“On Operation Eden, documentary landscapes juxtapose with carefully composed portraits of survivors. The images bring to mind Alec Soth’s well-regarded series “Sleeping by the Mississippi”, as well as Richard Avedon’s most intimate black-and-white portraits. The blog format, relatively underused by photographers at this level, has allowed thousands of people to visually follow the aftermath of Katrina as the months have passed, and to contribute funds to relief efforts.” -Rachel Hulin, Rolling Stone

“In Operation Eden, he bears compassionate yet unsentimental witness to the effects of Katrina upon the lives of area survivors, including family and friends. His portraits of Katrina survivors appear in some instances to be so openly intimate it’s as if they were taken from the far side of a mirror. While intimate and in some cases highly emotional, Cubitt nevertheless resists the easy tendency either to heroicize his subjects or to subjectify them in relation to any pre-chosen message.” -Alyssum Wier, i-20 Gallery

“These portraits, as timeless in their way as the Depression-era government supported WPA project that employed the efforts of photographers such as Dorothea Lange, and Walker Evans, are testaments to the earnestness and creative urgency that Cubitt felt was the appropriate moral response to the calamity and intense resignation that is so palpable in the faces of the survivors.” -George Pitts, LIFE Magazine.

click to enlarge

“Clayton Cubitt, (aka “Siege”) has his photographic finger stuck in many pots. His highly stylized editorial work has appeared in Surface, Rolling Stone, and The FADER, among other publications. Meanwhile, on the web, he chronicles his personal and professional life in photograph and words on his weblog The Daily Siege. His work is, more often than not, relentlessly sensual, saturated in deep colours, infused with an explicitness that lays its subject as bare as possible. Working within his own philosophy that inspires him to shoot with no holds barred, Cubitt’s lens lingers over muses ranging from the mid-coital form of his fiancée in bed with another woman to a dead baby bird set before him.

His indulgences, it seems, are women, fashion, and sex. There is little distinction for him, it appears, between the personal and the professional. As a photographer, he has crossed the proverbial line, including himself – as voyeur and participant – in an on-camera life that utterly obliterates the distinction between object and subject, rendering objectivity an archaic term. With his rock star dalliances and a desire to marry high-art style and low-brow subjects, Cubitt sits at the photographic edge.” -Susannah Breslin, Eyemazing