The Kind of Photographer Who Keeps You Up All Night

Couldn’t sleep. Sat there with late-night sitcom reruns running in the background for noise, spending hours falling down the rabbit hole of one man’s work: Clayton James Cubitt, who I’m officially adding to the short list of photographers I actually give a shit about. He’s so aggressively alternative that he loops back around into being one of those archetypal deranged sex-and-fashion photographers—and yet he pulls it off without the usual hollow posturing.

She was 18, I was 29. It would’ve been hotter if I’d been 30. Let’s say I was 30. That’s how one of his one-night-stand shooting diary entries opens. The mix of confession and calculation is exactly right—not trying to be romantic about it, not trying to be shocking either, just honest in that specific uncomfortable way. He shoots tits, trees, friends, family, all jumbled together like a real life, and that intimacy is what makes a photographer worth following. The technical stuff is fine. It’s the access that matters.