Heaven is a Prison

Loose Joints is proud to present Heaven is a Prison by Mark McKnight, an exploration of intimacy with and within the austere terrain of Southern California’s high desert. 

In Heaven is a Prison, McKnight describes 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.

Divided into chapters, 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. (…) Text by Garth Greenwell. Heaven is a Prison is the recipient of the 2020 Light Work Photobook Award.