The “body as a landscape” is an infinitely renewable cliché in art, one that draws its power from the collision between shifting human passions and nature’s steadfast indifference. At its best, it inspires work that collapses the distance between our interior sensory world and the environment around us, either imbuing everything with consciousness or recognizing our own as a particularly freaky extension of nature.

In a recent discussion with Los Angeles–based photographer Mark McKnight held within his exhibition at Aperture (which had awarded him its 2019 Portfolio Prize), poet and novelist Garth Greenwell touched on what he sees as a great difference in the development of their respective art forms. At the genesis of American poetry was Walt Whitman, a figure who sowed the foundations of the canon with a queer approach to nature and spirituality. Conversely, a pioneer in American photography was Minor White, who depicted American landscapes and people in an expressive manner but sought to suppress his sexuality. As critic and editor Ingrid Sischy once wrote, White “obeyed the conventions of his time, and one of them was that if you were unfortunate enough to love your own sex—which he did—you controlled that information, and certainly didn’t advertise it in your work.”  Read More