Artist Interview: Conversation with Paul Knight
Paul Knight lives and works on Darkinjung Country in Ettalong Beach, NSW. His practice explores intimacy, gentleness, and the social structures that shape closeness. His photographic practice considers the image as a container for experience and examines how loving bonds are formed and expressed.
Knight’s ongoing series Chamber Music documents the domestic life he shares with his partner Peter. Through portraiture and still life, Knight's prints balance intention and chance and create a sustained meditation on intimacy as a counterpoint to power and hierarchy. The work reflects on how relationships are shaped and communicated through everyday life.
This interview between Paul Knight and Michael Moran, MAMA Head of Curatorial and Collections, occurred in August 2026.
Chamber Music commenced in 2009, coinciding with the meeting of your partner, Peter. It is an ongoing series of mainly small-scale photographs that documents your domestic, romantic, and sexual lives together. In this way the work sits within a lineage of photographic work that shares intimate and immediate moments of communities, but departs by picturing only the lives of you and Peter, a couple for whom aspects of private lives are made public. How do you artistically and personally contend with the relationship between intimacy and the public sphere?
The public expression is partly how the work engages politically. Predominantly, the image format is slightly off scale compared to modern and historical vernacular album photographs, also occasionally the images are monumental compared to these references. Through playing with scale, I am suggesting that the intimate world of lovers and love, is the most important aspect of human life. Rather than expanding into communities, I want to keep the pressure focused on the conceptual space created by lovers. Which could be two or more people, but that’s not important, what matters is the volume that romantic love itself generates, the way it takes up space and to let the camera become part of that. Although I have photographs of Peter and me from the day we met, our first meal, our first embraces, and that our shared lives have been lived in concert with the photograph, photography can never fully reveal the vast conceptual landscape that grows between lovers. But photography does have a unique presence, because of the way images linger and entice memory, of drawing emotion and the intimacy we exposed to its surface. The public nature of the project is also its cost. As I am testing the ability of the photograph to be a container, the project requires a pledge to open ourselves completely to it. I sometimes find it curious when people impart that they know Peter or I from the work, because potentially, they have only encountered photographs. Yet having said that, I can look at certain images that may seem ordinary to others, and I am shaken to tears, because parts of me are forever tethered to those realms. That is the tension, drama, and sometimes contradictory beauty of photography: that these small portholes hold within them activated realities. The ambition of Chamber Music is to reflect the vast world of love into photographic space. I imagine all these photographs of the series as connected beyond the picture plane, each one a small window onto a much larger parallel world. In the way that the project is asking how much the medium can hold, it also demands our continual giving. So that’s what we do, we offer material to the public domain of photographic space.
' I imagine all these photographs of the series as connected beyond the picture plane, each one a small window onto a much larger parallel world. '
Since 2009, Chamber Music has become your primary photographic project, supplanting prior work that documented the lives of others. Is there room for you at some future moment to broaden your photographic view, or is this project, at least photographically, enveloping of all else?
I continue to think photographically in different ways. However, Chamber Music does unify a lot of my thinking about the mechanics and theatricality of photography and how if you offer particular textures, structures, and behaviours, it responds with narrative and emotion. Since starting Chamber Music, I have made other bodies of work and with different people. The Couples and Folds series in particular, were ways of thinking through formal aspects of photography in alternate ways, as also was a body of work not shown in Australia, of black and white diptychs, depicting close-ups of Peter’s and my hands touching whilst we were under the empathetic effects of Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD). Photography is an extremely complex machine, it’s hard to sum it up in one way, but it often seems important that the risk photography asks, that first I ask that risk of myself. That the vulnerability is as local as it can be. It feels more organic that the risk originates and returns to the same place.
'Photography is an extremely complex machine, it’s hard to sum it up in one way, but it often seems important that the risk photography asks, that first I ask that risk of myself'
Your practice also takes in textiles and weaving. Whilst the photographic and textile approaches can feel distinct, they are linked by shared concerns and recurring textures and motifs. Given the relatively direct nature of your photographic work, existing as small prints that document lived experience, is there an element to which the textile works serve as a more experimental or expanded form of practice?
My interest in textiles developed from spending so much time with them as material subjects in photography. As an artist, you are always striving for new ways to render something visible and each medium brings its own language set, changing the relationship with audience. I do though enjoy when photographic and object-based worlds interact. The way that photographic fiction and fact shine on objects and how objects can heighten the tactile qualities of images. There will always be more scope for various material worlds to collide, and photographs remind me that even though presence can be distilled, it is also transient. Working with your hands is always a pleasure and offers material contact and a way to take part in labour that sits increasingly outside photographic practice. Touch is important, it’s an animistic thing, and I think we need to embrace it before we are funnelled away into worlds with less of it.
Paul Knight is the recipient of the Audray Banfield Award
National Photography Prize, 2026.
All images by Jeremy Weihrauch
