Mark Hunter—better known as The Cobrasnake—was THE photographer of Y2K party culture.
The name “The Cobrasnake” lands differently in a darkened, celebrity-filled nightclub. “Mark’s here?” someone asks. Heads turn. The room is at attention—because wherever The Cobrasnake goes, a flash goes off, and a moment becomes history.
When I first called The Cobrasnake, he had just landed in Paris from Berlin the night before. Between time zones and photoshoots, he was calling in from the road, doing what he has done for more than twenty years.
His real name is Mark Hunter. The Los Angeles-born photographer whose unscripted party images—of beer-stained American Apparel hoodies, DJs mid-sweat and pop stars caught mid-blink—took the internet by storm in the 2000s, defining the “indie sleaze” aesthetic and setting the tone for how the rest of nightlife would be photographed online.
Photo: Shot by The Cobrasnake. Mary Kate Olsen hides behind a feather coat from paparazzi.
“When I was shooting, I knew it was important,” said Hunter. “I love the idea of documenting the culture. And especially in those early days, there weren’t a lot of cameras, especially when we didn’t have iPhones, so you didn’t have a million photos from every party.”
Photo: Shot by The Cobrasnake. Katy Perry sits with friends.
Before The Cobrasnake became a nightlife legend, Hunter was a young adult moving through 2000s LA, camera in hand,orbiting art studios and underground shows. He credits Patrick McMullan’s Studio 54 pictures as an early inspiration for taking nightlife seriously. And there was plenty to take seriously: nightlife has always been where subcultures are born, where fashion mutates, where the people who will define the next decade are still anonymous enough to be themselves. At the same time, the internet was quietly reshaping how culture was diffusing, and Hunter saw an opening.
“I was like, how cool is this, that my outlet was the internet. That was a limitless new concept, right? Hunter said. “I didn’t have to hold myself to be in a few photos in a print magazine that came out every month or whatever; I just could post online and share my work that way.”
Photo: Shot by The Cobrasnake. André 3000, wearing a newsboy cap, flashes an old handout of Hunter’s.
Instead of waiting for magazines to recognize the history he was capturing, Hunter published what he shot the night before on his own site. He launched TheCobrasnake.com in 2004, initially called “polaroidscene.” He found his way through the city via flyers, gallery openings, and word of mouth. One of his earliest guides was LA Weekly.
“Lo and behold, about two years into doing my website, LA Weekly approached me and said, ‘Hey, we love your work. Would you want a column in here?’” said Hunter. The result was Snake Bites, a weekly color column featuring Hunter’s best shots from the previous week, paired with short captions and personal anecdotes from the nights he’d covered.
As the site grew, so did his reputation. Invitations began to stack up. Flights replaced bus rides. The parties got bigger, crazier, more international. By 2008, Hunter wasn’t just documenting a specific scene; he was circulating through a global one. Out of necessity, the project expanded beyond him alone. He was joined by “photographer minions,” friends and other photographers, to be his eyes where he wasn’t. A photo album from LA, one from Tokyo, one from Australia, all on TheCobrasnake.com.
“Sort of like a Getty Images, but a hipster version. I couldn’t always be everywhere, so I built this little army,” Hunter said.
By the early 2010s, TheCobrasnake.com had become what people would later call “the Instagram before Instagram,” a world map of nightlife before social media. Long before any of it was bound or bookmarked, Hunter was building the premier archive of the Y2K. Without him, much of it would simply not exist—little to no record, reference point, or proof that any of these parties happened at all.
Visual motifs on the site had a tendency to reappear in the world. Drink labels, fashion quirks, hand gestures, even attitudes traveled through TheCobrasnake.com before anyone had words for them: the look of “indie sleaze” forming in real time. For example, after Hunter briefly wore glasses without lenses following a LASIK surgery, the look began turning up elsewhere. TK example
Photo: Shot by The Cobrasnake. The musical trio Salem pose together.
“It’s the people in the photos that deserve the credit, because it was their style that I was drawn to,” said Hunter. “It was their creativity and the way that they would present themselves that inspired me to take photos in the first place.”
Hunter has always pointed his lens toward the margins — the queer clubs, the underground parties, the rooms that mainstream culture hadn’t yet decided were worth paying attention to. Long before mainstream culture recognized them, his archive was crowded with queer and trans icons and the parties they frequented. He talks about these nights with the same attention as any fashion show or festival lineup.
Photo: Shot by The Cobrasnake. Kim Petras stands in front of a concrete backdrop.
His camera documented spaces that mainstream culture hadn’t caught up to yet. “Those are honestly some of the most fun parties to be at,” Hunter added, because “the crowds are just so full of life. And the looks are always amazing.”
By the mid-2010s, the current that once carried his work began to shift. As social media swallowed nightlife whole, attention migrated to Instagram pages and stories, and party behavior changed. Selfies and deliberate posing got in the way of the spontaneity Hunter was there to capture. Everyone became their own documentarian.
Photo: Shot by The Cobrasnake. A group of partygoers poses on a sidewalk.
“It felt like people were more excited to see Katy Perry backstage taking a selfie with her phone than the photo that I would take of her.”
After more than a decade of constant shooting, Hunter eased back. Events like Coachella, Art Basel, and Paris Fashion Week remained on his calendar, but he felt less pressure to chase nightlife as culture adapted to the “influencer” age.
Photo: Shot by The Cobrasnake. Taylor Swift uses her camera at a party.
In 2022, he released his aptly named photobook, “Y2K Archive,” which gathered a decade’s worth of nights into a single volume of smeared eyeliner, cigarette breaks, and celebrities to be. Catalogued in university libraries and stacked on stylists’ desks, the book became a primary source for our picture of the 2000s.
Photo: Shot by The Cobrasnake. The Dare and Billie Eilish join Charli XCX for her birthday party.
But the book’s release coincided with a larger cultural shift. After the social-media dominance of the mid-2010s, the Covid lockdown years made people nostalgic for the kind of nightlife they had taken for granted. When club doors finally reopened, the 2000s returned as a reference point for how chaotic and fun nightlife could be. High-contrast lighting came back. Messy hair came back. So did the hunger for rooms that felt reckless—and the kind of photography that had once immortalized them.
“I sort of have had a rebirth in this 2.0 era of my work,” Hunter says.
Photo: Shot by The Cobrasnake. Fakemink poses with Nettspend.
The names have changed, but the eye capturing them hasn’t. Hunter went from documenting Steve Aoki and Crystal Castles in the 2000s indie scene to embedding himself with the artists defining today—2hollis, Nettspend, Snow Strippers, Bassvictim, Frost Children, and The Hellp.
Having documented so many eras, he’s watched scenes bloom and collapse, faces rise and vanish — and seen firsthand what the excesses of nightlife can do to a person
“I was never really big into drugs or alcohol,” he said. The fuel, instead, was sugar and caffeine. “Eating Sour Patch Kids and drinking Red Bull,” he winced. “That did a number on my teeth over the years.”
These days, the counterweight to those snacks is movement. Hunter started Cobra Fitness Club in the mid-2010s as a way to make working out feel less grueling and more communal. What began as a hiking group for hipsters grew to include yoga classes and boxing gyms.
Photo: Shot by The Cobrasnake. Two partygoers share a kiss.
Looking back, the first heyday of TheCobrasnake.com is more intelligible—it reads more clearly as an act of cultural preservation. Even after the blogs of his fellow photographers went dark and platforms reshuffled, his images stayed put. What Hunter had the instinct to preserve became the visual record for an entire decade of nightlife—the awe, the chaos, the hedonism, and the vulnerability of it all. Only now is it clear that no one else was doing what he was doing: holding a mirror up to a specific, irreplaceable moment before anyone thought to call it history.
Hunter talks about art the same way he talks about fitness: as a discipline. His advice is disarmingly simple:“If you’re going into a creative field or whatever, treat it like a forty-hour week.It is a lot of work.” The nights, the edits, the emails, the self-promotion. None of it is optional.
History doesn’t arrive fully formed. It’s built by people who show up long enough to make a moment visible. Hunter did it once. Now, with a new generation in his lens, he’s doing it again.
