Mark McKnight's Heaven Is a Prison (2020)

I've been thinking and writing about Mark McKnight's work for many months now, but each time I turn to it I find myself confronted by the questions that bewildered me on first acquaintance. Novel-writing and photography have a storied alliance, from Zola to Sebald and Teju Cole, but while art photography had intrigued me it had never, until I was asked to write on McKnight's work, affected me so profoundly; it had never imposed itself with such existential urgency or so powerfully intersected with my own endeavors in art-making. My fascination with McKnight has led to an education in the history of his medium, and especially in the modernist masters whose aesthetics he inherits, transgresses, and transforms. Some of my questions, I know, reflect my innocence of the medium. How is it possible for an art to be at once so bound to its subject matter, so faithful in the literal representation of particular reality, and yet so prone to metaphor and abstraction? How can what is finally a mechanical process feel so steeped in subjectivity? These are naïve questions but also ones that haunt the medium; sophistication doesn't resolve them so much as, in a kind of polite conspiracy, discreetly let them drop. Other irresolvable questions—other sources of wonder—are more particular to McKnight's work. How can these images be so cold and so hot at once, so restrained and mastered and also so utterly unbridled? How can they be so expressive of both abjection and exuberance? How can they seem—entirely independent of their subject matter—so filthy and so clean? Most profoundly: how can images that reject so many of the usual sources of affect—psychological narrative, social context, the expressivity of the human face—nevertheless be so saturated with affect, so nearly operatic in register? My initial, immediate sense of the work has not faded with familiarity. Its achievement lies in holding these contraries not in stasis but in a kind of vibrating suspension, and this suspension c