Online, we are bombarded with an endless stream of half-baked images, ads, thirst traps, and AI experiments, all flattened into the same algorithmic sludge and rebranded simply as “content.” The feed wins by sheer volume. But now and then, something cuts through. Photographs that force your eyes to stop darting and searching. If you look in the right places, you can still find images that penetrate the murk. Images that refuse to disappear, that demand a second look, that remind you what seeing should feel like.
Sam Penn’s photographs live in the space between vulnerability and documentation, so intimate that they may make you feel like an intruder. She has shot for Balenciaga, Bottega Veneta, and Vaquera and is currently on a break from the Ultrasound World Tour with Lorde, where she is documenting the musician’s life onstage and behind the scenes. Her new exhibition, Max, which opens November 6 and runs until December 20 at New York Life Gallery, turns private life into public record with unflinching tenderness and honesty. The series documents Penn’s relationship with writer Max Battle in photographs that oscillate between the romantically mundane and the sexually charged, offering a raw look at intimacy stripped of performance or pretense. “I wanted to see what the most intense version of sharing could be,” Penn tells Vanity Fair. “Hopefully, it makes people think about their own relationship to sex.”
The images are confrontational in their honesty, a mirror held up to both subject and viewer. “It felt important for there to be some pictures where I’m directly looking into the camera,” she says. “I wanted a level of confrontation in the work. I know they’re looking.” Two people, unguarded, totally surrendering to the process—two people who refuse to filter themselves for an audience. In a time when everyone edits everything, Penn’s work insists on being seen exactly as it is. Max shows precision, curiosity, and the quiet confidence that exposure itself can be a valid form of power.
Battle isn’t just Penn’s subject but also her collaborator. His text accompanies the images, offering a rare inversion of the gaze: the person being seen also gets to speak. “Sometimes we’d try to redo something, and when we’d show up to the same place on a different day, everything would be totally different,” Penn says. “It was a reminder of the spontaneity of what shooting with another person is always like.” From photographs of the routine—shopping for essentials in a French pharmacy—to the more charged and intimate, Battle’s words add texture and context. “She gasps, losing control. Pleasure, power; she takes pictures. Her body is hard like glass, dazzling and breakable,” he writes. It’s a conversation between lovers and mediums, capturing moments that feel both familiar and extraordinary—glimpses of connection that, by nature, are impossible to hold.
The post Photographer Sam Penn Has Conquered High Fashion and Touring With Lorde. Now, She’s Freeze-Framing Intimacy. appeared first on Vanity Fair.
