Maximilian Kilworth’s A Summer Built on Softness traces a year falling in love with his first partner in their ‘second adolescence’
On a late June evening, on what was only their second date, photographer and art director Maximilian Kilworth brought his camera. Nathan, his soon-to-be boyfriend, brought his too. Neither of them knew it then, but that gesture – one teaching, the other learning – would become the axis of a yearlong photographic meditation on queerness, intimacy, and the kind of first love many queer people encounter out of sync with the timelines we’re told to expect.
“I never really documented my life before in such a diaristic way,” says Kilworth, who usually works with fashion image, “but to actually document a year of my life was a really interesting thing to do.” What began as a handful of rolls of film soon became A Summer Built on Softness, a series that traces a relationship’s beginning – the first for both – with equal measures of fragility and insistence. “It all felt very natural to me,” he says. “I never really thought about it as a set body of work until I got to the end. And then I realised it could be something.”
That “something” is a collection of hundreds of images – mundane, erotic, quiet – that stretch across days, seasons and arranged chronologically. We see toothbrushes balanced in a sink, steam curling in a shower, hands first touching tentatively, then with more assurance. Kilworth describes it as his “second adolescence”, a chance to experience a love and intimacy that had felt inaccessible earlier in life. “So much of it was about giving myself permission to experience and feel it. As exciting as it was, it just felt really peaceful and natural.”
This framing draws directly on queer temporality, as theorised by Jack Halberstam: queer lives unfold against and outside heteronormative milestones like high-school sweethearts or early marriages. “Everyone thinks first love happens when you’re a teenager,” Kilworth says. “But for me, and for so many other queer people, that’s just not the case. We don’t really have the privilege of dissecting those romantic aspects of our lives when we’re young. We’re just trying to survive.”
Shot on analogue film, the photographs are diaristic in their patience. Their grain and blur feel deliberate, even protective. “I like to think of my camera as a shield,” Kilworth says. “It was my way of saying, ‘OK, I’m going to connect with you.’ I didn’t really know how to connect, but I knew how to connect with a camera.”
His influences circle: there’s Nobuyoshi Araki’s Sentimental Journey, there’s Judith Joy Ross. Kilworth acknowledges his predecessors while resisting the easy trappings of “gay photography” as mediated by magazines and screens. “So much of the media’s representation of gay men is overtly sexualised,” he says. “I recognise that there’s nudity within this work, but it’s not about anything sexual. It’s more about self-presentation. What is my relationship to myself without clothes or without fashion?”
That question resonates for someone trained in fashion imagery. A graduate of Central Saint Martins’ MA Fashion Image program, Kilworth was schooled in collecting, researching, and constructing visual worlds. But this project asked him to step aside from world-building. “I think the best work is always the most personal,” he says.
Some of the earliest frames show awkward beginnings – hands fumbling gently, Nathan’s face absent. But as the sequence progresses, the images soften and grow more assured. “As the relationship grew, Nathan wasn’t just a spectator to my camera,” Kilworth explains. “The camera was a spectator to both of us making something – whether that was the images or the relationship.”
This reciprocity underscores why A Summer Built on Softness feels collaborative. Nathan, in his willingness and curiosity, became both subject and co-author. “I always like to say it’s just as much his work as it is mine,” Kilworth says. “You can sense in the images that he gradually became more comfortable, and they become more intimate. That path mirrors the path of our relationship.”
If all this sounds toe-curlingly sentimental, Kilworth embraces it. He doesn’t claim the images will tell viewers what love feels like – “they can’t.” Instead, he suggests, the camera is simply a witness. “For me, at least when I look at these images, I can’t describe it other than just saying there’s a feeling there. The final image is the gift that allows other people to experience that.”
Slow, gentle, attuned to the accidental textures of everyday life, Kilworth’s series reminds us that world-building need not be grandiose. Love, in its many forms, is often a matter of brushing your teeth beside someone, and choosing to see the poetry in it.