// About
Kevin Cadaver
I don’t live behind four walls. I was told that was a phase. It has outlasted every apartment I ever signed for.
A camera is a passport. It gets me into the back of the venue, the third hour of a tattoo, the van at 4AM between two cities that both feel like nowhere. Nobody asks why you’re there if you’re carrying one.
I photograph people who chose the harder road on purpose. The apprenticeship over the salary. The tour van over the mortgage. Risk over routine. They aren’t romantic about it. They just did the math and decided comfort was too expensive.
I’m not interested in your good side. The good side is the part you already know how to perform. I want the hour after, when the room goes quiet and you stop holding your face together. That’s the frame worth carrying home.
Nothing I own owns me. Everything fits in two bags because it has to. The road doesn’t negotiate and neither does the weight limit.
- Based
- Las Vegas · NV
- Travel
- Anywhere the road goes
- Working since
- MMXX
- Studied
- Bachelor’s · Business Administration, Marketing concentration
- Bachelor’s · Entertainment Marketing
- Associate’s · Commercial Music
- Associate’s · Social & Behavioral Studies, Anthropology
- Certified
- Avid Pro Tools
- Direct
- kevincadaver@cadaverous.ink
01 // The Creed
Why I Do It
Kevin Cadaver · First Person
The lowest I have ever felt was during the stretches when my voice and my creativity were muted.
Alienation and depression pushed me further into the underground. Music venues and tattoo shops, rooms where individuality and self-expression were the whole point and the wounded were welcome. Between shows and shops, those subcultures became my family.
Cadaverous was built so nobody in those rooms has to stay muted. I studied the business end of it on purpose, because somebody has to know how the money moves or a scene cannot pay the people inside it. The launch event was set for 2020. The pandemic took the event and shut the industry behind it. The name kept working anyway.
Content evaporates. Proof stays. A print on your wall is a relic, physical evidence that something real happened in a room you weren’t in.
Everything I make is built to survive the scroll, and most of it is built to survive being handled.
The work has an order to it, and the order doesn’t bend. You make the thing before you understand it. You put it out before you’re ready. You become the person who made it, afterward, never before. Waiting to feel ready is just the long way of never starting.
Create. Express. Become.
In that order, every time.
// The Rig
What’s In The Bags
I bring what the room needs and leave the rest in the truck.
Stills are the spine of everything. Film when the moment can breathe, digital when it can’t.
- Editorial and portrait
- Live music and event coverage
- Studio and on-location
- Tattoo, product and process documentation
- 35mm film and digital, delivered graded
Motion when the story needs time. Cut for the platform it’s actually going to live on.
- Short-form vertical, built to stop a thumb
- Brand film and documentary shorts
- Event recap and aftermovie
- Interview, B-roll and behind-the-scenes
- Color grade and finish
If it can be printed, it should be. Screens forget. Paper doesn’t.
- Brand identity and marks
- Poster, print and layout
- Album art, merch and packaging
- Editorial and zine design
- Physical goods built as relics, not swag
Direction, not decoration. I’d rather build one true thing than thirty forgettable ones.
- Creative direction, end to end
- Campaign shoots and launch assets
- Content strategy and social direction
- Asset libraries built to last a year
- Retainers for people who move fast
Travel-ready. Vegas-based, rarely in Vegas. Ask about the road.
02 // The Series
The Cadaver Crew
The camera is my passport into every industry and every walk of life.
Cadaver Crew is the series I’m building with it. People who understand they could die any day, and choose to spend every one of them doing the thing they love.
They know exactly what it costs. The apprenticeship over the salary. The tour van over the mortgage. The jump, the needle, the road, the stage. They do it anyway, because the alternative is a long safe life spent being someone else.
They’d rather die doing what they love than live doing anything else.
If that’s you, or you know who it is, I want to document it.