King’s images are straightforward and sensual. Not part of a series, they still all feel connected. And they are. King was there to photograph the edge of a bed, a figure lying on his side in an empty dark room that the sun shines in. She was near the woman (or is it a self-portrait) who emerges nude from her wedding veil. She observes the long-legged young girl revealing her blue bra and her red bikini, perhaps her first set of adult underwear. The intimacy of these encounters captured in King’s photographs builds on the fine examples of other photographers. I am thinking of Nan Goldin, Sally Mann and Joanne Verburg. In the selection on view here, King shows us the nude or near nude body, a body in a state of nearly being undressed, a body exposed to sunshine, light and air. The body in repose. King reminds us of how the experience of being in these apparently simple states is both sensual and profound. Her photographs impart a quality of well being, as if to say, such experience is available to everyone, at any moment, anywhere. King is their trusted co-habitant of that moment, as she records a shared particular space and time.
Elisabeth Sussman
Whitney Museum of American Art
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