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The seemingly conflicting qualities of intimacy and distance come to define the work of Australian-born, Berlin-based photographer and artist Paul Knight. Part of a wider, ongoing project titled Chamber Music – which documents the day-to-day life Knight has shared with his partner Peter over the course of their relationship – his first book jump into bed with me considers intimacy as a conceptual proposition.

Positioning his 35mm camera on any available surface within the given environment or architecture – a mantelpiece, a log, a coffee table, or a rock at the beach – and setting a timer, Knight and his partner simply make themselves available for the camera to see what it sees. Laundry, breakfast, sex, day trips to the seaside, nights at the pub, moments of domestic calm; here, Knight eschews his diaristic gaze in the same way he loosens photography from notions of time or chronology. We’re left to consider both the spatial and the relational qualities of the sequence and the image.

Paired with an edited transcript of the couple’s history of text messages to one another, jump into bed with me is at once a missive to a lover and an ode to photography’s intrinsic processes. The camera, when left to its own devices, can capture wonderful and beautiful things.

Paul Knight (b. 1976) holds a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) at the Victorian College of the Arts and a Master of Fine Art, Glasgow School of Art. He has been the recipient of the prestigious Anne & Gordon Samstag International Visual Arts Scholarship, studio recipient at Gertrude Contemporary, winner of the William and Winifred Bowness Photography Prize at the Monash Gallery of Art, London studio residency by the Australia Council for the Arts and a New Work Grant from the Australia Council for the Arts. Knight’s work has been included in NEW08 (Australian Centre for Contemporary Art), Primavera (Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney) and Bloomberg New Contemporaries (UK). Knight has exhibited in Australia, UK, Europe, USA and Japan.