In one photograph from Katy Perry’s birthday party, Taylor Swift is holding a compact camera beside Sky Ferreira. Mark Hunter has turned his own camera toward the people watching the celebration. There’s a lot of future pop history in that part of the room, but it’s the little camera that makes the photograph interesting. Swift can make her own picture of whatever is happening. Hunter can make a picture of her looking. It’s an early glimpse of a party where just about anybody might decide which moment matters.
Under the name The Cobrasnake, Hunter photographed the 2000s club and party scenes in Los Angeles and New York, where DJs, musicians, designers and people with a persuasive way of getting dressed kept turning up in the same rooms. The flash is the first thing you recognize in many of the pictures. The more interesting question is where he chose to aim it. At a birthday party, most cameras have an appointment with the cake. Hunter was willing to miss a candle going out if something better was happening among the people looking on.
The party photographer who looked sideways
An on-camera flash is good at making a crowded room look smaller. The person nearby gets the light. People behind them might remain visible as fragments of faces, shoulders and clothes. Some of the distance between the photographer and the subject disappears in the picture, while the rest of the room can feel miles away. Hunter could turn a few feet of space into a convincing account of a whole night.
Follow the reaction
The advantage of photographing the crowd at someone else’s party is that its expressions are available before the photographer asks for anything. A person might be laughing at an off-camera friend, watching the singer or already looking for a way through the room. Hunter could use those moments alongside the frames in which people knew exactly what they wanted to show him. The contrast gives his galleries their peculiar tempo. One person has spent all evening cultivating a look. Another walks through a shot wearing an expression they’ll never be able to make on purpose.
Hunter describes following a commotion to make the image in which designer Stefano Pilati, editor Olivier Zahm and DJ Leigh Lezark are swept into the action around Mary-Kate Olsen. There’s a conventional celebrity photograph somewhere in that setup. The version he wanted depended on the people moving around the person everybody might already recognize. The flash made the whole cluster legible at once. You could follow the names later.
The website was the other half of the work
Hunter originally published his pictures on a site called Polaroid Scene. The Cobrasnake name followed, and the website gave people a place to return to after a night out. They could find a photograph of themselves, recognize someone from another party, or look through a gallery from a city they’d never visited. The audience included people who had no way of getting into the room and could still learn its visual rules.
That’s part of what made repeat appearances powerful. In his interview with W, Hunter recalls how people began following Cory Kennedy after seeing her repeatedly on the site. A single picture could show a person with a good outfit. Seeing that person over time let viewers recognize the small decisions that made the style hers. The gallery had room to build a relationship with somebody’s image long before a magazine needed to make a case for putting that person on its cover.
The setup encouraged a peculiar kind of anticipation. The party could be over and the most consequential version of it might still be coming. The photograph you remembered posing for could be less interesting than the frame somebody made while you were getting out of the way. Think about the camera in Swift’s hand again. As soon as guests could publish their own versions of the evening, the authority of the person with the camera began to look different. Hunter’s archive catches a moment when that authority was already being passed around the room.
What survives the indie-sleaze label
Seen together in Rizzoli’s The Cobrasnake: Y2Ks Archive, the pictures offer plenty for someone looking to reconstruct an outfit. They also preserve relationships that are harder to copy. A dress can tell you how somebody wanted to arrive. The way they stand with a friend can tell you something about where they felt comfortable after they got there. Hunter’s harsh light gives both kinds of evidence a place in the same photograph. It can pick out a patch of fabric and record the hand someone put on a shoulder without thinking.
There’s a temptation to look through old party photos for people who became famous, as if everything in the room were waiting for their careers to start. The better game is to give the people you can’t name a few seconds of your attention. See who spotted the camera first, who carried on talking and who found a way to get both friends into the frame. Hunter photographed a culture that was learning what it meant to go out and be seen again the next day. The light catches that negotiation while it’s still happening.
