Sam Penn captures the mutual intimacy of sex and connection

“Eventually, we slept together, then we didn’t, then we did again, and I took photos of him the whole time,” explains New York-based photographer Sam Penn, whose latest photobook and exhibition, Max, documents a relationship with partner Max Battle through 19 intimate photographs and accompanying text. The project presents an openness that comes with sharing so much of yourself and a partner, something made only more intimate by Penn and Battle’s shared trans identities. While many debate how to choreograph the introduction of a romantic partner into your life – hard launches, soft launches, and everything in between – for Penn, photographing willing friends and lovers in intimate situations has always been a given. “The camera is part of my relationships from the beginning,” she explains.

In this instance, that beginning was at a party, where the pair first met. Over the next two years, as the relationship found its rhythm, photographs accumulated. Penn and Battle were guided by a shared fascination with sex, beauty, and the ways life itself could become material for art. “In our most recent conversation about starting back up, we talked about the possibility of working on a project like this in the same breath. It’s really felt like our personal and creative relationship has been developing in tandem,” Penn explains.

The project was shot mainly across New York and Paris, though geography is almost incidental to the work. Penn’s lens often zooms in, capturing their bodies – bare chests, soiled underwear, and Max in various states of intimacy – in small, nondescript rooms or side-by-side with shots of undistinguishable natural landscapes. “I’ve been thinking about the close-ups of bodies as different kinds of landscapes that offer glimpses into the environments of the relationship,” Penn explains. The images also refrain from being placed in any form of timeline, creating a development of intimacy that only the pair can fully perceive. “A lot of people think that taking a photograph only takes a split second, and in some ways that is true, but I’ve always thought it takes a long time. As I get closer to someone, as I shoot them more, the possibility for a good picture increases,” she reflects.

That exchange is also one of agency. While a photographer is often assumed to hold control, the pair approached the project as a collaboration, each shaping how the other was represented. “The show is so much about a sexual exchange, so it felt right for there to be a creative one as well,” she explains. “Max proposed that he write something to claim some control over the process. I thought it would be nice to have the text live with the pictures, so I proposed doing a book. I hoped his piece could subjectify me and our relationship on his own terms, to balance out the dynamic.”

This structure allowed them to fully submit to each other: every photograph could be met with an equally intimate response in writing from Max. “Each of us could respond to what the other person was shooting or writing, and we knew these responses would be public – if I chose to show an intimate picture of him, he might choose to write something explicit about me. The mutuality pushed us to a place together that I don’t think either of us would have arrived at alone.”

These recurring themes of intimacy, relationships, and the body span across Penn’s work: “It turns me on to the world. I feel attuned to my mind and body when I’m with someone I care about.” she tells us. While most of us instinctively hold something back when creating, it’s a risk that Penn embraces: “I want to take photographs that show what it’s like to feel alive, and for me that feeling is most present when there is a physical or emotional exchange with another person.”

Of course, sharing the work in a book, online, and most daringly in a gallery becomes a broader exchange, one the pair have navigated with intention. With growing policing and attack of trans bodies, there’s a visibility and vulnerability in presenting themselves so openly – an exposure that isn’t lost on the pair. “We are both aware of the current heightened interest in our bodies, and wanted to create work that plays with that, while remaining in charge of our own subjecthood,” Penn explains.In the exhibition, the first thing someone sees when they walk into the space is a seven-and-a-half-by-five-foot self-portrait, this time with the photographer looking directly into the camera, at the viewer, while in a sexual situation. The rest of the space is largely occupied by images of Max’s own nudity. “It was important for there to be a direct address and testimony from each of us in the show and book,” Penn explains. And this is her way of doing that: “My self-portrait feels protective of the rest of the photographs in the space, because the only way in is to meet my gaze.”

Max is running at New York Life Gallery, New York, until 20 December, 2025