A nude figure reclines in a hard landscape, face hidden behind a skull mask. Others traverse the same stark ground. Mark Armijo McKnight’s Posthume gathers fourteen such photographs, yet the book is not a survey of bodies so much as an argument about what a body can carry: grief, ritual, desire, and the refusal of a clean ending. The masks come from two directions at once — the European memento mori and the Mexican Día de los Muertos, in which the dead remain present, fed, and addressed. McKnight, working from both his queer identity and his Mexican American heritage, does not resolve the tension between the sacred and the erotic. He lets it stand.

The photographs are reproduced as hand-tipped, tri-tone plates, each roughly eight by ten inches — an intimate print scale inside a book that measures roughly 36 by 48 centimeters. That pairing, small plates in a large page, gives the images air and gravity without spectacle. The sequencing is restrained. Across thirty-six pages, the pictures accumulate like a slow argument rather than a sequence of events, and the ambiguity — alive or dead, resting or discarded — is held open rather than explained.

The physical object extends the thinking. The book is housed in a box of utilitarian materials and wrapped in a custom paper made with artisan papermakers in Oaxaca from native agave fibers, embedded with dried cempasúchil petals of the kind placed on Día de los Muertos altars. The gesture is tactile and symbolic at once: a shroud, an offering, a return to the earth.

For a collector, the pertinent facts are plain. Posthume is published by TBW Books in 2025 as a signed and numbered edition of 750. The photographs are credited to McKnight throughout. What recommends the book is not scarcity but coherence: a photographer using the photobook’s full apparatus — plate, paper, sequence, collaborator — to make an object that behaves like the subject it describes, holding the living and the dead in the same room.