CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/22/2023

For Pride Month, the black, queer intimacy of Clifford Prince King

Clifford Prince King’s “The Backyard” (2019) is reproduced from Love Songs: Photography and Intimacy, the International Center of Photography’s new survey featuring work by fifteen established and emerging photographers including Nobuyoshi Araki, Nan Goldin, Leigh Ledare, Collier Schorr and King, among others. “Clifford Prince King’s documentary-style color photographs are anchored in the artist’s celebration of queer Black love and bear witness to changing and divided societies,” Sara Raza writes. “In the context of US history, King’s photographs highlight wider social topics concerning the struggle for Black liberation and public space and time. Challenging the spaces that were long dominated by colonial male heterosexual desires and influences, King subverts narrow perceptions of gendered and racial roles in modern and contemporary society. Allegorically questioning the paradox of polarity, King’s works are imbued with overt and covert visual signifiers that illuminate the value of the previously unseen, unrecorded, and hidden. His tableaux seek to disrupt fixed norms through a surreal, dreamlike art of subversion.”