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Aperture: Mark McKnight on the 2019 Portfolio Prize

Growing up, 2019 Portfolio Prize Winner Mark McKnight grappled with reconciling his identity, both as a mix-raced person of color and as a gay man—particularly one who neither exemplified nor desired the idealized, Eurocentric cultural standard of male beauty.

His work operates as a site of resistance to those values. In black-and-white photographs of bodies and landscapes, Mcknight explores concepts of desire, vulnerability, and entropy. “When you’re making work, it’s because you want to engage, and Aperture’s Portfolio Prize has allowed me to engage in a broader way, and in the best possible way,” McKnight comments.

Growing up, 2019 Portfolio Prize Winner Mark McKnight grappled with reconciling his identity, both as a mix-raced person of color and as a gay man-particularly one who neither exemplified nor desired the idealized, Eurocentric cultural standard of male beauty. His work operates as a site of resistance to those values.