Clayton Cubitt

Have you ever stared into someone else's eyes, without speaking, for five minutes? Not in a staring-contest way (which is about something else entirely) but in a windows-to-the-soul way? It's surprisingly hard to do, even with someone you know intimately well. Such naked attention can be unsettling.

That's why artist/photographer Clayton Cubitt is a genius. A few years ago he filmed a handful of what he calls "long portraits," which are videos of a single person looking into the camera for approximately five minutes. Unlike a photograph or a painting, the long portraits give you the sense of looking at the subject not just for one moment in time, but of looking into the subject's inner world over a span of time (and believe me, five minutes feels like an eternity when you're looking into someone else's eyes). At the end, you feel as if you understand the subject better, somehow. Certainly moreso than you would after having looked at a still photograph of him/her. It's a fascinating experience.

Below is the first one I watched, and as such it remains the most powerful (at least as far as I'm concerned). I highly recommend watching it on Vimeo's site instead, since it's larger there than it is here.

Long Portrait: Lambchop from Clayton Cubitt on Vimeo.

Clayton Cubitt's blog, Constant Siege (occasionally NSFW), is also pretty cool.