Intimacy is not only his subject but also integral to his creative process. The men in the pictures are his friends, his past lovers. His self-portraits tend to be off-kilter-“Orange Peel and Biktarvy,” a follow-up to “Night Sweats,” is a spin on the fruit still-life, featuring his medication-but King is nonetheless an overtly personal photographer.
“Night Sweats” captures the photographer’s early days of living with his illness. (He is an autodidact, having honed his photography practice outside of the art-school system.) In 2017, King was diagnosed with H.I.V. Shortly after high school, he moved up north, to Portland, Oregon, where he began to explore his sexuality and his interest in photography. King was born in 1993, in Tucson, Arizona, in the Sonoran Desert, an environment that must have taught him the physics of heat and light. I later learned that the photograph is an oblique self-portrait. It is a minimalist shot of a bed, gray sheets wrinkled and drenched with some fluid. There is no body at all-only the residue of one. It was a photograph called “Night Sweats” that drove me to look up King’s history. He is not simply interested in making these men available to be “seen” he is intent on showing a modern audience, one that is inevitably hungry and politicized, that there is value in ambiguity, in privacy. The city has some of the best be it bars, clubs, saunas, or inventive go-go boy shows when it comes to catering to the LGBT crowd. With these images, which are simultaneously cryptic and exposing, King complicates the concept of visibility for Black gay men. Bangkok's gay nightlife is touted as a hub in Southeast Asia for good reason. The man is gazing out forlornly, but it’s hard to read his expression, as his face is partly obscured by the hand. A hand, reaching up from the bottom of the frame-presumably belonging to the photographer-holds a blunt to the lips of a man reclining in bed. In the picture, the feeling of rupture is intensified by form. So, too, is “Our Last Blunt Together,” which may be, as the title suggests, the story of a breakup. It is an unyielding image, teeming with mystery and wit.
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Just behind him is a water-cooler jug full of loose change and bills there’s also a blurred figure, reflected in the mirror, who appears to be naked as well.
His posture is crumpled, his dick flaccid, suggesting that something has gone awry. He is classically beautiful, but this is not the pose of a classical nude. In “Jug of Change,” a naked man sits in a swivel chair with his back to a mirror, his head wrapped in a black do-rag, one hand covering his face.