Sam Penn’s 19 exquisite images of herself and her boyfriend, writer Max Battle, in a new show, “Max” (New York Life Gallery, November 6 through December 20), will gladden your heart. Bathed in the kind of light that only seems present when you’re with the one you adore, this is a show all about love, closeness, yearning, and, yes, intense sexual attraction; these might be some of the most emotionally resonant and deeply personal images I’ve seen in the longest time. Penn and Battle, who are both trans, have navigated their relationship and very carefully chosen how they reveal—expose, even—that relationship so that their shared vulnerability becomes a remarkable iteration of strength and honesty.
“Ever since I’ve known Max, I’ve photographed him,” Penn says, “and as we became romantically and sexually involved, the quality and the quantity of the photographs increased. I’ve always been interested in doing a show focused on only one subject, and Max was down for the ride.” She and Battle are sitting at the Odeon restaurant on a recent Friday morning and discussing their remarkable exhibition, which marries Penn’s imagery (where inner nakedness is more powerful than anything more explicitly corporeal) with Battle’s writings (which evoke a raw, uncompromising spirit). The two mediums will be presented in tandem at the gallery and in an accompanying book, which includes an extra nine images. "We crash out separately,” writes Battle. “Drugs, exes, obsession, and rejection. Who am I and who is she and anger and apathy. Jet-setting, political duress, too much work and not enough of it. She lashes out. I’m needy and self-abasing. None of this ever stops us from fucking."
“I was interested in doing the project right away, and as it unfolded, the reality of it sunk in,” Battle says. “The writing was a way for me to put my anxieties and excitement and the charge that I was feeling around all of it into something—and to objectify Sam a little bit as well, because in part the writing somewhat flips the dynamic between the photographer and the subject, so there are moments where I am more in control of the situation.” What’s inherent in the images they’ve cocreated—solo, together, naked, loving and sexualising each other—is a palpable sense of trust that only comes when there’s real intimacy. “Trust has been a big part of the project,” agrees Penn. “We’re both interested in using our lives as material and to see how far we could go with this show and how far we could go together.”
Sam Penn and Max Battle met about four years ago—the usual story: Social circles intersecting at some point, and suddenly the person on the periphery is at the very center of everything—and this series of images was taken over the last year, with most shot this summer. For each, the process was one of constantly dialoguing comfort levels. “We couldn’t have arrived at this without having the support of each other,” Penn says. “And because we’re giving such large-scale access to our bodies and to the information in Max’s writing, there had to be a level of protective confrontation in the work.”
Along the way, Ethan James Green, the photographer who founded the New York Life Gallery, was a valued sounding board in terms of both editing and presentation. The awe-inducing presence of this show is inescapable as a viewer—an effect underscored by the scale of the images, which measure 7.5 by 5 feet—yet the work also confronts the often dreadful realities that many trans people have to deal with, particularly in today’s climate. “Being with each other, and making the work together, is a natural response to the world,” says Penn. “The decision to print the images really big and to be so insistent with the shamelessness of the photographs and the writing meant we could achieve a level of protection.” For Battle, the show has made him realize that “I don’t think I’ve seen photos quite like this before with people with bodies who are similar to mine. It would have meant a lot to me to see images like this at a different time in my life.”
Yet while we can be both moved and empowered by this impressive collaboration between two deeply creative souls, in the end everything goes back to their fearlessness—and their most tender feelings for each other. “This has provided an outlet to externalize the challenges that come up when you’re building a relationship with someone,” Battle says. “When you do it, there’s no running away. We’re doing this intense, emotional, vulnerable thing together. It has brought us closer, and it has made our relationship stronger.”