I first encountered Mark McKnight’s photographs in the spring of 2019, when I was invited to write an essay on his work after he’d won the Aperture Portfolio Prize. I was immediately taken by his stark, yearning black-and-white images. Shot mostly with a 4×5 view camera, McKnight’s photographs reference the history of the medium—much has been made of his relationship to modernist masters such as Edward Weston and Minor White—while at the same time radically renovating it in terms of style and subject matter. McKnight’s photos feature friends and lovers from his Los Angeles queer community, male bodies of a kind—large, hirsute, nonwhite—typically excluded from canons of beauty. He often insists that his choice of subject is fueled less by ideology than by Eros: he photographs the bodies he desires. In late 2019 and early 2020, McKnight shot a new series of photos in the California desert that daringly extends and deepens his exploration of sex, desire, and place. McKnight photographs sex—including sadomasochistic and fetishistic sex—in a way that complicates simplistic notions of pleasure and pain, dominance and submission. In their exploration of ambivalence, his images suggest a rich and nuanced—I want to say novelistic—approach to intimacy. The series makes up McKnight’s first photo book, Heaven is a Prison, which won the 2020 Light Work Photobook Award and is published this month by Loose Joints. Read More