Never has his subject matter been so assertive as in these photos of sex portrayed with pornographic explicitness never has the style been so sustainedly lyrical in individual photographs or so ambitious in its use of sequence. But these new photographs also mark a departure. Heaven Is a Prison, his debut monograph, out from Loose Joints Publishing this month, shows the essential qualities of his work: the exquisitely modulated black and white photographs shot in sometimes punishing natural light, often exposed and printed so that details are obscured and shadows attain a kind of abyssal black the dramatic use of the desert landscapes of the American West the sensual depiction, sometimes tender, sometimes a little cruel-often both of these things at once-of bodies that are often excluded from the canons of sensuality in art everywhere, a commitment to beauty, though beauty of a challenging, even an adversarial kind. Its achievement lies in holding these contraries not in stasis but in a kind of vibrating suspension, and this suspension conveys the sense of inexhaustibility, the bottomlessness necessary in all art that commands enduring attention. 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. Each time I turn to the work of Mark McKnight, a 36-year-old Los Angeles–based photographer who won last year’s Aperture Prize and has become a kind of phenomenon in the fine art world, I find myself confronted by the same questions that bewildered me on first acquaintance.

Cleanness by Garth Greenwell