Our exciting year of talks concludes with Sam Penn and Max Battle in conversation about their new co-authored book, Max. The book accompanies Penn's solo exhibition at New York Life Gallery, which is on view through December 20.
Max focuses on Penn's collaboration with Battle, using trust to expose the entanglement between her private sexual life and her photographic practice. The exhibition comprises 19 self-portraits, portraits, landscapes, nudes, and close-ups of bodies on four free standing walls that frame her largest-scale prints to date.
In addition to Penn's photographs, the book additionally includes an essay by Battle that gives interiority and narrative to the subject through a series of thirteen vignettes. An excerpt from the piece follows.
In the pharmacy, we struggle to find shampoo, shaving cream, sunscreen, and toothpaste in French travel sizes. We laugh and sigh and grab at each other as a task that should take five minutes drags us into the second half of the hour. I pick up a bottle of hand cream and curl my palm around the smooth plastic. I want to ask her, why do you love me, what would you do if I ended up pregnant, do you believe in marriage, would you break up with me if I pushed you in the canal, would you ever kill a man? We have breakfast in the park, surrounded by children laughing and picking at deconstructed hamburgers and fries. We talk about having kids. The fantasy keeps at bay a plethora of unpleasant realities, offering instead the pursuit of some long and legible future. We bike past an army of stern-faced French police officers, a hundred or so at least, machine guns held against their armored chests.
She shot 29 rolls this month, almost a thousand pictures, my body from every angle. Each image stings like her hand on my ass when I ask nicely. The greater the distance between the present and the moment of capture, the less the person in the photographs belongs to me; the harder it is to remember that I was there, moving my body into position, saying yes, saying no, saying please.
