The Cobrasnake

A love letter to a time before Instagram, and the legendary party scenes of the 2000s that brought together the new millennium’s rising stars of pop culture.

Under the moniker The Cobrasnake, the photographer Mark Hunter captured the party scenes of Los Angeles and New York during the hipster-glam heyday of the 2000s – and in doing so defined the look of a generation.
 
First with a Polaroid and then with a digital camera, Cobrasnake captured pioneers of youth culture from Kanye West and Steve Aoki to Jeremy Scott, Katy Perry, and Lindsay Lohan – icons of the indie pop world in the making. Intimately connected with the people around him, and keyed-in to the edgier fringes of the fashion, music, and art worlds, Hunter photographed influencers before they were influencers, in the wild and at play from the streets of LA to NYC and beyond.
 
Collected here for the first time are more than three hundred of Cobrasnake’s most iconic images alongside ephemera, from concert tickets and backstage passes to outtakes and unseen photographs from his many adventures. These photographs are records of the last generation of partiers to pre-date the live-streaming of culture afforded by today’s social media – capturing the energy and vibrancy of a time before Instagram.