Peter Murphy for Metropop

Katrina PSA, "Tear Drop"

Ad agency Grey Worldwide worked with the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) and the Ad Council to create a series of PSAs highlighting the need for Katrina surivors to reach out for help. Depression and post-traumatic stress disorder are rampant throughout the survivor population in the Gulf Coast.

They sent me down to photograph survivors for the ads. I spent a week in New Orleans and Mississippi. This is the first ad to come out.

Men's Fitness, August 2006

Converse Ad Campaign

Now on newsstands, the "Big Shoe" ad campaign I shot for Converse Shoes. Above, a small selection of the ads.

Hurricane Katrina Survivors

My family, and the communities they live in, the places I grew up in, have been totally destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, and worse, the bungled governmental response afterward. I've been down in the Gulf documenting in photographs and words what they've been through, and how they're surviving. Family, friends, neighbors, and strangers all reaching out to each other like life rafts. You can read all my coverage here, at Operation Eden

The above image, from Operation Eden:
"Mike Walters, 40, Fireman. His birthday was on September 4th, just a couple of days after the hurricane hit. Shot at the Charles B Murphy Elementary School in Pearlington MS, which is being used as a distribution point for survivors and aid workers to gather, get and give supplies. The school is the only structure in the whole town of Pearlington that I saw intact. That look on his eyes I saw on a lot of people stumbling around in the dust and heat. It's shock and fatigue and gathering hoplessness. It's the realization that Pearlington has been forgotten, and they are on their own."

Metropop Denim, With Tom Carden

The Denim Issue of Metropop is now on newsstands. I shot the cover, and the eighteen-page feature fashion spread inside. For this project I collaborated with innovative UK generative artist Tom Carden, who adapted an applet specifically for the shoot parameters.

See the whole shoot here.

Processing, the developers of the software platform that Carden used for the piece, has a little behind-the-scenes in the making of the cover, and some of the variations of the applet used. You can see that here.

After the post-production was finished, and we could admire the fruits of our labor, I talked with Carden a bit about what exactly generative art is, his background, and how he felt about the finished pieces. You can read our conversation after the jump.

Vellum Magazine Preview

We just completed post-production work on a ten page fashion spread for Vellum Magazine. Will be on newsstands in a couple of weeks. See a preview here.

If you'd like to read about the trickery behind-the-scenes check out The Daily Siege, my photoblog on Nerve. A sample:

"I'm fascinated with the ability of photography to freeze, and thus control, the uncontrollable. Water. Blood. Smoke. Women. I also derive pleasure from mimicking in-camera effects with CG-effects, and vice versa. In this regard, I might have been influenced by my brief time assisting Alexei Hay, because he's the same. People often assume that the effects in my shoots were done using a high-end 3D modeling program like Maya, when in reality they are usually effects that could be accomplished in a well-equipped color darkroom. The computer just makes their creation faster. And less smelly." Continue reading... (free reg. required)

MisShapes for Metropop

On newsstands now, I shot a 20-page feature spread for Metropop Magazine documenting the faces and fashion of MisShapes, the weekly downtown NYC party. When the magazine approached me to shoot a fashion spread for the issue with the theme "modern bohemians", I knew I didn't want to do a standard styled fashion look. So I got in touch with some friends at MisShapes and set about shooting it as a portrait/street-style documentation, just photographing the kids in their own style, presented how they wanted to show themselves, over the course of one late Saturday night.

Here are the pictures.

Destined Accolade

I'm currently the featured photographer on the Destined Collective site (warning: snazzy Flash interface). A selection of images and short interview (wherein I use the word "twats") here (look for Clayton Cubitt. Damn non-linkable Flash).

Update 4/7/05: I'm now archived, so look at bottom left of page and click on "Search Past Contributors", wait, wait (good thing they gave us a soundtrack), then type "Clayton Cubitt". Isn't Flash craptacularly fun?

SENT: Phonecam Art

I'm one of the contributing artists invited to make images for the SENT project, America's first phonecam art show. I believe it's only the second exhibit of phonecam art in the world, the first being in Norway recently. The SENT mission statement:

"SENT will be the first major exhibit of phonecam art in the United States. We'll explore the camera phone's potential as a creative tool in two ways: through an online public dialogue in which amateur photographers and phonecam users around the world share mobile snapshots of their lives; and through an invitational exhibit in which professional photographers, artists, and public figures test the limits of creative possibilities offered by these hybrid devices.

Phonecams -- mobile phones that include tiny, built-in digital cameras -- are a relatively new gadget. They've only become widely available in the US in 2003, and their use is largely utilitarian: snap a photo of your baby, your sunset, your face; then, share it with friends or family. They're small and cheap. We use them to capture the mundane, the obvious, and the personal. Soon, we'll use them to capture and manipulate data: phonecams are becoming handheld barcode readers, and tools for a variety of new mobile commerce applications.

The images they produce are undeniably crude, but like Polaroids or snapshots from vintage or "toy" cameras, that lack of finesse lends a distinctive, awkward charm. And the fact that they fuse together the abilities to capture, view, and distribute what we see (through e-mail or online photo weblogs) makes them revolutionary. Phonecams are changing the way we see the world, and our place within it. They're an extension of urban eyes. They democratize, hack, and deconstruct photography. When everyone is both photographer and publisher, how will art change? How will human conversation change? What will be the difference between professional and amateur? Through SENT, we'll find out."

SENT project site and my submission.

Suicide Girls Magazine

Suicide Girls was planning to launch a magazine. They hired me and Terry Richardson to be the feature shooters for the premier issue.

I shot one of their girls, Stormy, while she got a lightning bolt tattooed over her ribs. Everyone was stoked on the final shots, and the magazine went full steam ahead. Until it all fell apart. Evidently there was some major disagreement between the site and the independent publisher who had been responsible for putting the print version together. So after a few months of work, the mag was killed, at least for the time being.

So, today, it's my orphaned Suicide Girls shoot, because home or no home, I still like them. Story here.

And here's a little silly controversy that erupted when the images I shot got leaked on the internet when the magazine was about to hit the press.

Big Apple Grapple for The Fader

To get the most from this documentary series, smear your upper lip with Ben-Gay and play "Eye of the Tiger" at full volume. The Big Apple Grapple International Arm Wrestling Championships, held on board the aircraft carrier Intrepid docked in NYC, shot for The Fader. The ref giving the "thumbs up" in this series is Bobby Buttafuoco, big brother of the infamous Joey. He's evidently the best arm-wrestler in New York City for like 13 years running. He was very nice, but I didn't ask him about Joey because I was worried he'd beat me to a pulp with his anvil-like fists if I did. See the shots here.

Picture Magazine Feature

Hot on the heels of the Surface Avant Guardian prize, I was featured in Picture Magazine. If you'd like to hear me sound like a jackass, you can read the interview here.

Surface Avant Guardian

I was selected to appear in Surface Magazine's Avant Guardian project, featuring the best young fashion photographers working in America. Besides the magazine spread, my work was featured as a mural in a group show that traveled from New York to Boston, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. These parties were very well-stocked with pretentious hipsters straining their necks to see and, more importantly, be seen. Free booze flowed, and I think some photographs were accidently looked at by a few people.

Random Thoughts On My Intent

Beauty can be created from anything. Excrement is also fertilizer. Life and death need each other. Without dark, we cannot appreciate light. I draw no distinction between high and low. An aesthetic can be highly crafted, yet retain raw passion. No matter how complex a thing is, it can be explained simply. No matter how simple a thing is, it can be made to feel complex.

Style is not just a visual effect, repeated over and over again. It's not a pigeonhole for critics to feel comfortable in, or a bite-sized description to be easily digested by the marketplace. Style is an honest viewpoint, reflected back from a subject. It's the long view.

As much artifice as I put into my work, I still speak plainly. I have no patience for snobbery. That which people think is most ugly about themselves is often the very thing that makes them uniquely beautiful. I will not tolerate my own killing shyness in pursuit of truth in my work.

My work gives me permission to push boundaries. My camera is my passport into other worlds, and the tool by which I bring them back for you, preserved, filtered through me.

It's been believed in the past that the camera steals souls. I once thought this preposterous. Now I think it's self-evident.

This is why we photograph. The fear of oblivion, ours and our worlds. We will inevitably die, but our photographs, if they're honest, if they show our lives with clarity, unafraid, our photographs will preserve us. Our souls at least. Who we were inside, and the things we saw. Our images? Particles of light that have been traveling forever bounced off our subjects, were focused through our lens into the tender tissue of our eye, and our brain, and our film. Now, those very same shapes, made by those very same particles, the same ones we saw, others can see. Forever, they can see that fraction of a second we saw.

That's immortality.