Clifford Prince King (b. 1993) is an artist and photographer living and working in Los Angeles, CA. King documents his intimate relationships in traditional and routine settings that speak on his experiences as a queer black man. As an artist who did not attend college or formally study the medium, King’s imagery is uniquely his own. Layered within his tender portraits are nods to the beyond. Shared offerings to the past manifest in codes hidden in plain sight, known only to those who sit within a shared place of knowledge. A poster in a bedroom, a wig on a dresser, the labor of watermelon, small collections of items that signify a specific blackness and sensuality. All these could be missed. In these instances, King’s work begins to morph into an offering of memory; it is how he honors and celebrates the reality of layered personhood. Soft moments of refuge and uninhibited intimacy that is unapologetically honest. King’s imagery prioritizes what it means to be seen and tended to in ways that move beyond the physical. Portraiture becomes prose. It is in the layering of spaces that King’s work is not simply an act of archiving; it is a part of a collective world making, of sustaining and imagining black queer existence defined by the lived experience of those who are black and queer.
