Paging Through “Heaven Is a Prison”- Photographer Mark McKnight’s ‘Queer Otherworld’.

Sep 14

By Mark McKnight 2020. Courtesy of Loose Joints and Light Work.

Set in Southern California’s high desert, Heaven is a Prison is an exploration and depiction of complex and nuanced intimacy. According to Mark McKnight, it is “a queer otherworld that is at once utopic and purgatorial – occupied by a solitary pair of copulating, Sisyphean protagonists that appear both liberated and bound by their intimacies and the severe expanse in which they are depicted.”

McKnight, who shot the project towards the end of 2019 and beginning of 2020, wanted to capture the inherent duality of sex, desire and place: pleasure vs pain and dominance vs submission, for example. As the book’s publisher, Loose Joints Publishing, writes, “the poetic sequences in this book oscillate between the literal and the figurative, between distance and communion, and between violence and affection. Claustrophobic, horizonless landscapes are coupled with images of ethereal clouds and tangled bodies that are simultaneously sculptural, shrewd, and tender.

In a discussion with Interview, McKnight described the project rather candidly: “For a long time, I’ve been making work that has sort of signalled and skirted desire and talked around it. It was purposeful, but I wanted to make pictures of ass-eating and piss play, of swapping spit and penetration, and insist that those things, too, could be graceful and elegant and essentially art. I wanted to insist on the acts themselves as being incontrovertibly beautiful and meaningful.”