Heaven is a Prison

Loose Joints is proud to present Mark McKnight’s Heaven is a Prison, an exploration of intimacy in the stark terrain of the Southern California high desert. In Heaven is a Prison, McKnight describes an otherworld that is both utopian and purgatorial, occupied by a pair of copulating Sisyphean protagonists who seem both liberated and bound by their intimacy 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, between violence and affection. . Claustrophobic, horizon-less landscapes are paired with images of ethereal clouds and entangled bodies that are at once sculptural, artful, and tender. (…) (…)

The texts in the book were written by Garth Greenwell.

Heaven is a Prison received the 2020 Light Work Photo Book Award.