Mockingbirds don’t do one thing but make music for us to enjoy… but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird. –Harper Lee (via Clayton Cubitt on Instagram https://instagr.am/p/CeRilWTJfa9/)

#manhattanhenge as seen from across the East River in Long Island City. Loved all the people jammed in to any cross street, holding their tiny cameras aloft. (via Clayton Cubitt on Instagram https://instagr.am/p/CeKqXcgsthC/)

We have the power to create a utopia with peace and plenty and safety for all, right now. The system, as operating, will kill us all if we don’t change it. We need to change it. There is no choice in that matter. The changes we need to make are easy and sustainable. A tiny toxic minority of obsolete thinkers, small of spirit, fearful of everything, hateful, dedicated to dead gods, is stopping us, keeping us in a dark age. They have names and addresses and we vastly outnumber them. We can rise up and peacefully create a better world right now. We have no choice but to. It’s self-preservation. Let your heart be a flower open to the sunrise that’s coming. It’s time to blossom. (via Clayton Cubitt on Instagram https://instagr.am/p/Cd_pOegJJj1/)

Whenever it takes great courage to do the right thing that’s a sign that the system is built to promote the wrong things. (via Clayton Cubitt on Instagram https://ift.tt/337lFvh)

We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind—mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality. –J.G. Ballard (via Clayton Cubitt on Instagram http://bit.ly/2WRTMsn)

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.

(via Clayton Cubitt on Instagram http://bit.ly/2XRDN9Z)

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

(via Clayton Cubitt on Instagram http://bit.ly/2HMdfBE)

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

(via Clayton Cubitt on Instagram http://bit.ly/2Kgsggr)

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

(via Clayton Cubitt on Instagram http://bit.ly/2W01MqF)

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

(via Clayton Cubitt on Instagram http://bit.ly/2VMbX17)

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 

(via Clayton Cubitt on Instagram http://bit.ly/2IIlAYM)

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!

(via Clayton Cubitt on Instagram http://bit.ly/2VZoM5b)

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! 

(via Clayton Cubitt on Instagram http://bit.ly/2VZJRw9)

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. 

Buy yours here

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.

(via Clayton Cubitt on Instagram https://ift.tt/2xzRzmE)