Sun pounds thirsty ground. Two guys—bearish, without inhibitions, brown—fuck across several photographs in “Hunger for the Absolute,” Mark McKnight’s solo show here. Surveying these and the equal number of uninhabited “straight” landscapes (turned pervy through sheer adjacency), a discerning ’mo might have paused to reflect upon a pair of visionary American photographers, certainly McKnight’s forebears: Laura Aguilar (who is no longer alive) and Jack Fritscher (who is still up and kicking). Both contributed to the cultural and communal sensibilities underlying the unrepentantly queer expressions that McKnight, and those similarly attuned, makes prodigious use of today. So let’s pause for a brief invocation and sing our praises to Aguilar for her technical precision and for the discerning placement of her own queer, fat, and brown body in the dramatic desert landscapes of California’s Coachella Valley and offer a hosanna—or three—to the polymathic Fritscher, the gonzo writer, sometime photographer, and former editor of Drummer (the watershed leather publication that did much to deliver BDSM into the hands, hearts, and dungeons of many a fledgling kinkster). Read More