flatmarkus is an art space, currently in Zurich. 

Clifford Prince King

Opposite of on the other side

October 5 to December 21

opening on October 4 from 6 to 10 pm

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There is a rare kind of trust in photography in Clifford Prince King’s images. With great care, his photographs place the viewer in the middle of intimate scenes where life and images seem to merge and where memorializing becomes a way to spend time. His work embodies Hervé Guibert’s idea that “the image is the essence of desire” and that “if you desexualize the image, you reduce it to theory.” King trades in the messy essence of desire. As a self-taught artist who came to photography through Tumblr education and movies, his work quickly became a tool to find kinship and befriend black and queer folks in his community.

 

Clifford Prince King’s photographs strike me as pictures made by a good listener—someone who is quiet but curious and knows where to stand in a room and when to ask the right questions. By photographing his friends and lovers, or the lovers of his friends, the artist conjures an ever emergent queer utopia. If, as David Wojnarowicz wrote, “a camera in some hands can preserve an alternate history,” in King’s hands, the camera summons a different present and future. At once direct and refined, his pictures, which bear a quiet intensity akin to film stills, depict black gay men in relatable scenarios: they are kissing, they are making love, they are fucking, they are hugging and looking into each other’s eyes before moving out of Los Angeles.

 

In the romantic and the hopeless (2021) the feet of a man hover over the head of another man like bunny ears—in life as in images, it is always hard to know for sure who is the romantic and who is the hopeless. In Personas (2020), Morning Fog (2022) and in the deep end (2022), imbricated shadows, blurry foreground and dramatic contre-jours amount to a symbolic language that could bring to mind a Langston Hughes poem about growing older:“I have almost forgotten my dream. But it was there then, In front of me…” For King, photography is also a way to process things slowly, one day at a time. In a still-life, facing the sun and precariously balanced on the narrow ledge of a window, an empty Biktarvy pill bottle serves as a vase for a single flower, which seems to say: “take care of your blessings.”

 

Emile Rubino