Cum on a Clit Is Punk as Fuck

I couldn’t sleep that night. Sitcoms were running in the background on some network channel, the kind of garbage you watch when your brain won’t shut off and you’re just scrolling through everything. But I kept getting pulled back to this photographer—Clayton James Cubitt. And I’m adding him to the list of photographers I actually care about.

He’s the kind of alternative that loops back around to being exactly what you’d expect from someone doing this kind of work. Crude, sexual, willing to put his actual life in the frame. One of his diary entries from a shoot starts with something like, She was eighteen, I was twenty-nine. It would’ve been hotter if I was thirty. Not apologizing for it, just stating the fact like it matters. And in a way, it does—the specificity, the honesty about desire and age and the exact moment things happened.

He shoots breasts, trees, his friends, his family. Same camera, same openness, no pretense about separating the intimate from the mundane. That’s what actually makes a photographer interesting—not the technical skill, though he has that, but the willingness to let you see something real. The mess and the desire and the bodies you’re not supposed to photograph all existing in the same frame.

It’s punk as fuck, which is probably why I can’t stop thinking about it.