Biographical info for Aaron Knight

Young Aaron Knight was forbidden to touch the family camera. His first camera was so cheap, it didn’t work.

Born in Lafayette, Louisiana, Aaron Knight lived with his parents and two older sisters along the southern portion of the Bayou Vermillion River. His late father was a petroleum engineer, and the family left the United States for the Aramco communities of Dhahran and Ras Tanura, Saudi Arabia when he was three years old.

His mother, a painter, ensured Knight was exposed to the visual arts, devoting hours to museums (which he hated at the time) and cultural sites during family vacations. In particular, Karnak in Egypt and Petra in Jordan left him awed by their scale. His mother took copious reference photographs for her art, depicting the beaches of the Persian Gulf, oil refineries, and geometric architecture.

In Saudi Arabia, female beauty was censored in movies, magazines, and on television, and women were cloaked from head to toe in abayas. Family vacations in Europe, however, revealed permissive attitudes, as embodied by a woman walking in a tube top and thong in Stockholm, Sweden or kink magazines displayed at eye level on a German newsstand. American culture lay between the extremes of Arabia and Europe: Playboy magazines were visible but out of reach.

With a childhood reputation for destructive “creative expressions” like disassembling things or lighting them on fire, young Knight was prohibited from touching the family camera. For a middle school class assignment, he constructed a pinhole camera from an oatmeal box. He also used the school’s 35mm film camera, printing and developing black and white in the darkroom.

Knight’s earliest artistic expressions regarding women’s bodies were secret collages clipped from swimwear and underwear catalogs. An awareness that such imagery could be socially acceptable came in the form of pin-up-style pop art. In New York’s Museum of Modern Art, he was struck by Tom Wesselmann's Smoker and Mouth series and Roy Lichtenstein’s playful nudes. He was also inspired by Pin-Up by Hajime Sorayama, his first art book.

For grades 10 through 12, Knight lived on campus at a boarding school in Denton, Texas, returning to Arabia for summers and breaks. A surrealism art history class secured his interest in visual art. He was captivated by the genre’s playful eroticism and interest in the subconscious. Ironically, that art history teacher discouraged Knight from straying from academics.

A desire to pursue art while also having a fallback plan led him to double major in art and computer science at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. Defying his father’s wishes, he switched to major only in art, a dispute that caused family tension and took years to reconcile. This was an early experience of choosing art over more practical considerations, a dilemma that resurfaced throughout his career.

In college, Knight painted and practiced photography seven days a week. He painted over previous work to save on materials, a practice an instructor ended by purchasing his paintings so he could afford blank canvases. When his set of oil paints was stolen, he made his own from ground pigment, binder, and drying oils. When he lost his roommate during his senior year, he decided to scrape by financially. He used the extra space as a studio, photographing four or five people a month.

He exhibited in the college gallery, local competitions, and national collegiate publications. To buy framing, he held a bake sale. In his sophomore year, a local gallerist approached him to exhibit his photography. She insisted, however, on only showcasing his photographs of females, an indication of where his strength lay. Upon graduation, his work won awards in the senior art exhibit, and the college purchased two of his works for its permanent collection.