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Skateboarding irreparably changes the way you perceive the built physical world and structures of power that guard it.

It’s hard to ever have respect for authority again after you’ve bombed a rail and serenely glided away from a cop chasing and yelling at you.

Rosy cheeks and repose ___ A quiet secluded life in the country, with the possibility of being useful to people to whom it is easy to do good, and who are not accustomed to have it done to them; then work which one hopes may be of some use; then rest, nature, books, music, love for one's neighbor — such is my idea of happiness. –Leo Tolstoy

My friend Nina a few days after her craniotomy to remove a brain tumor

The world's continual breathing is what we hear and call silence. –Clarice Lispector

Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red. –Clive Barker 

I *love* my editorial and commercial photography practice, but I don't want only corporations to be able to afford me. That's why I donate so much of my time to social movement photography, and that's why I'm making this Personal Portrait Commission available for a limited number of bookings. Book here 

For a limited time only: personal portrait commissions 

"For twenty-five years, Clayton Cubitt’s portraits have graced the covers of magazines, featured in advertising campaigns, museums and gallery shows. 

 Now his studio is pleased to offer, for the first time and for a limited number of bookings, affordable one-on-one personal portrait commissions."

April and early May are already booked but there is availability in late May and beyond, while the offering is still running, book now and reserve a spot even if we close the offering!

Big little news! If you’ve ever wanted me to make your portrait, I’m happy to announce that my studio is now accepting a limited number of affordable personal commissions, as my schedule allows.

Book soon, they won’t last long! 

I made sweatshirts with the subtle affirmation “yes” embroidered over the heart, reversed, so whenever you look in the mirror you understand you can. You will. You’re ok. You got this. YES. 

My portrait of Rodricus Crawford, a Louisiana man who had been wrongfully convicted in the death of his infant son, and sentenced to death in Angola State Penitentiary, where he served years alone in a tiny cell on death row before the state Supreme Court ordered his release.

This happened in Caddo Parish, Louisiana. Do you know that America incarcerates more people than anywhere on earth, and my home state incarcerates more people than anywhere in America? And in Louisiana, Caddo Parish is the capital of incarceration, and the death penalty. A single man, the prosecutor responsible for sending Rodricus to death row, Dale Cox, was responsible for more than a third of all death sentences in Louisiana, more per capita than anywhere. He was quoted as saying the state needs to "kill more people," and in Rodricus' case he wrote to the parole board to request that the prison inflict on him “as much physical suffering as it is humanly possible to endure before he dies.”

Caddo Parish was the last capital of the Confederacy in Louisiana. It was a stronghold for the Confederate army. It was the last place to bring down the Confederate flag. During Reconstruction it was known as Bloody Caddo, for its campaign of systemic racial terror meant to maintain the apartheid of the Confederacy. More lynchings happened in Caddo than in any other parish in the state.

Rodricus spent his time on death row at Angola, Louisiana's notorious state prison. Before Angola was a state prison it was a slave plantation. But what's the difference between Angola the plantation and Angola the prison? Prisoners, mostly black, still are forced to work the fields, guards, mostly white, guard them from horseback with shotguns raised. Systemic racial terror.

Faulkner famously said "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Bloody Caddo isn't past. Angola isn't past. Lynchings aren't past. This is all happening right now during your life. During your parent's life. And their parent's before. It's never been past.

For the sake of Rodricus, and for justice, we need to make it past.

My photograph of a detail of Naum Gabo's 1945 "Linear Construction in Space No. 1"

The infamous @mollycrabapple in my studio. Single shot. iPhone. Coffee. Absinthe. Purpose.