Orange Grove.

Photographs by Clifford Prince King.

TIS Books, 2022. English, 92 pp., 45 illustrations, 9½x11".

Selected as one of the Best Books of 2023 by:

Matthew Genitempo

Clifford Prince King moved to Orange Grove in 2016 with friend and collaborator Malcolm Marquez. They shared a warm two-bedroom in the Burbank hills, tucked into a leafy courtyard within walking distance of the Sprouts, where King worked the early shift.

The photographs from this time detail the spectrum of exploration, bliss, and transformation that comes with burgeoning queerness in a new creative, social, and physical landscape that shaped the ethos of these two artists’ creative practices.

Orange Grove is dark and handsome, filled with King’s warm and intricate portraits that flow like tapestries while witnessing lovers and friends in the ether of vulnerability. With eyes wrapped around each other, King’s portraits remind the viewer that sex and intimacy are intrinsically collaborations.

King makes the everyday transparent while embracing the fantasy of the daydream. Romance in Libra demands balance, doesn’t it? A night comes and goes, but what if the moment could last forever? Fingers interlaced, a slow dance in the kitchen, post-hookup eyes.

Orange Grove is an orbital chart filled with many lives and connections. King is not the center, but he touches all as he traverses new realities of desire and intimacy. Woven into the narrative is King’s 2018 HIV diagnosis, and the subsequent shifts in the body that illness brings. Sheets dampened from night sweats transpose to pills on two tongues and an arm around the shoulder.

A bedroom is a place of mending, dreaming, and f**king. Orange Grove was a home. An altar to domesticity washed in the spirit of an evolving understanding of what is queer and black and masculine (not necessarily in that order).

You’re invited in. You’re taken care of. There are books you’ve never read, knick knacks on the shelf, a meal placed before you. Lay down on the floor and gaze around or you’ll miss what’s present. King holds his own dearly with intrigue and grace. Orange Grove captures with precision the wonder of companionship and the beauty of developing selfhood.

- Syd Haliburton

Ordering Information

Out-of-stock books are available to backorder from photo-eye.

Cat# CE079H Hardbound $55.00 (978-1-943146-32-1)
Backorder this item. Domestic titles usually ship in 2-3 weeks; Foreign: 4-8 weeks.

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