Spencer Cotton: 03.13.20

About

Soft Punk is proud to announce ‘ 03.13.20’ — an Instagram-based exhibition of thirty fresh works by New York-based photographer Spencer Cotton.

Framed in response to the U.S. announcement of a national emergency, Cotton bravely took to the streets of New York City as the current crisis unfolded, focusing his lens on the glimpses of humanity that revealed themselves in moments of mass confusion and collective fortitude. Ranging in location from internationally recognizable hubs such as Times Square and Grand Central Station, to the quiet corners of his native Bushwick, Brooklyn, Cotton melds otherwise disparate cultural spheres in the crucible of uncertainty.

This series is a coherent body of work that is not only resonant with those familiar with the city, but with anyone affected by the fallout of COVID-19. The exhibition will be released in four groupings (posts) over the course of twenty days, the first coming on April 16th, 2020, and the last coming on May 7th, 2020, on Soft Punk ’s Instagram account, @softpunkmag. This marks Spencer Cotton’s first showing with the magazine and a new professional foray into street and reportage photography.

Spencer Cotton currently lives in Brooklyn, New York and specializes in commercial, editorial and lifestyle photography. Having begun his practice as an ancillary project alongside his undergraduate degree in graphic design at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, his personal work quickly came to be dominated by the intersection of travel and personal interests, drawing gritty influence from skate and street photography. Professionally, Cotton has worked with globally recognized brands such as Land Rover , VINCE , Clarks , LRG Skateboarding, often adopting the photojournalistic approach born out of his early work. Soft Punk Magazine is a literary arts and culture quarterly, based between London and New York. Intentionally agnostic of a “house style” and liberated from dogmatic conceptions of brow, we curate emotive, insightful, and often brazen visual features, alongside fair reporting, vulnerable fiction, and unwavering criticism.