Mark McKnight was 18 or 19 when a photographer’s work first hit him hard. “There were two shows at the Hammer Museum in LA,” he says. “I remember borrowing my parent’s car and driving into town to see them. The first was a Stephen Shore retrospective. He is probably the reason I picked up a view camera. The second exhibition was a Wolfgang Tillmans survey.”
Mark mentions early in our conversation that he came out relatively late. With this in mind, his immediate reaction to Wolfgang’s work — in all its tender and often quiet framing of male queerness — was overwhelming. “I remember one particular photograph of three men embracing,” he says. “In the foreground, one of them is smiling softly, eyes closed. There is a profoundly tender, platonic quality to their embrace. It’s an almost brotherly depiction of homo-social intimacy that was so unfathomable in my mind up until that point that I just stood there in awe until I eventually burst into tears.” It would be some time before Mark came out, “but I carried that picture with me and found a kind of respite in it.” Read More