99 percent of you are either not going to have any idea who I'm talking about or care for that matter, but today when I was walking to get lunch, I walked past this guy:
Mark Hunter aka the Cobra Snake (his ingenue muse is behind him by the trash--a telling juxtaposition?) He goes to these hyper-hipster parties and takes party photos, which he posts on his website. He seemed surprise when I said as I walked by "Great photos man." And as we paused at the stoplight, he then passed me a sticker and then I asked him if I could take a photo (result above). From Wired:
Los Angeles-based Hunter may be the first person to make a living off a photoblog. He started a year and a half ago by sneaking into clubs with his point-and-shoot digicam to document the night's drunken festivities. Then he uploaded his photos to TheCobrasnake.com, for everyone to snicker at the next morning. It was easy to garner buzz when shooting the likes of Paris and Nicky Hilton, Beck, Johnny Knoxville, Andr� 3000, Jack Black, and Jarvis Cocker. Soon his pics were showing up in the LA Weekly, and companies showered him with schwag and party invites ("I'm a marketing genius," he says). He has plied his trade at the South by Southwest music fest, the launch party for Sony's PlayStation Portable, and even the NME music awards in London (with hefty stipends to cover travel, of course).
TheCobrasnake.com is as self-consciously crude as its proprietor's fashion sense, with childish illustrations and hundreds of pictures dumped onto pages without annotation. "I don't like futzing. If the photo doesn't look good, I don't mess with it in Photoshop," Hunter tells me. The amateurish look is all part of his brand. It's won him a book deal, and he's taking meetings with the producers of The Real World and The Simple Life, who are planning a reality show about him. But he still hasn't hit the big time - he can't afford a car, and he had to go on Extreme Makeover to get the Lasik eye surgery he wanted.