Sam Penn Bad Behaviour14 Images
Romantic, brutal, provocative and poetic. Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behaviour has been a bookshelf staple since its publication in 1988. A modern classic that excavates the most secret regions of her characters’ psychosexual landscapes with the unflinching objectivity of a forensic psychologist and a poet’s ear for heartbreaking turns of phrase, this cult short story collection invites us into its characters’ intimate moments of romantic and sexual exploration. Not only is the book based largely in New York, it feels intrinsically bound to the city; the landscape – so universally familiar – feels an essential component of the book.
Also drawn inexorably to New York, photographer Sam Penn first read Gaitskill’s book in May this year and found it resonated profoundly with her own life at the time. In a state of flux after “breaking up with someone, moving apartments and starting to see someone else”, the rhythm and mood of the book seemed even more affecting than ever.
Penn reached for her camera to document and explicate her circumstances, creating a series of images which evoke the flashes and fragments of memory used by Gaitskill to such great effect. Featuring portraits, landscapes and close-up shots of bodies, the series of photographs – named after Gaitskill’s influential book – are not so much a homage to Bad Behaviour as a retelling.
“The short stories were well suited to my attention span,” Penn tells Dazed. “The pace of my life was volatile; everything felt fragmented and quick, I found the characters in Bad Behavior entangled in each other’s suffering, dealing with heartbreak, addiction, and disappointment; what happens when a relationship doesn’t live up to expectation or fantasy. The stories felt like a reflection of my own life, and the work I was trying to make out of it.”
Now, nine colour photographs from Penn’s series Bad Behaviour are on display at Balice Hertling in Paris. The solo exhibition is also accompanied by a zine (published by New York Life Gallery) with even more images from the series.
Below, we speak to Sam Penn about the mythology and allure of New York, the abiding influence of Mary Gaitskill and the intense year from which her latest project was born.
To what extent do the images depict the events of Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behaviour? Could you tell us about your relationship with this acclaimed short story collection?
Sam Penn: I first read Mary Gaitskill’s Bad Behavior in May of this year right after breaking up with someone, moving apartments, and starting to see someone else. My show does not depict events from the book though I feel like the images take on a similar tenor. In the collection, Gaitskill uses a device to describe memory through flashes of connected imagery. These images stretch out across a character’s mind and allow for a deeper understanding of their past while they process it in the present. For the exhibition, I used this device to arrange my photographs in a sequence that chronicles a reminiscence of my year.
How did you conceive of each image? To what extent did you envision them before you shot? Or are they spontaneous?
Sam Penn: Most of my photos come about naturally when I’m spending time with another person. My practice is a social one and my relationship with a subject affects the way I shoot. Some of my friends have modelling experience and are aware of the camera in a particular way, while others are more or less comfortable being photographed as they go about daily life. I never have a specific result in mind when I shoot other than an impulse to add to my archive. A year is a good amount of time for something to take shape in my collection of photos, and once I pull the strongest images together, a plot for a show or publication reveals itself.
As you say, the pictures suggest fragments of narrative or memory, reflecting Gaitskil’s storytelling device. Can you tell us about any of the stories behind any of the images?
Sam Penn: I took ‘Speeding’ on the Brooklyn Bridge driving back from a rave at sunrise, ‘Entrance’ during afternoon sex, ‘Cloe in The Pines’ on a Fire Island roadway after staying up all night, ‘Torsos’ after the first time I had sober sex with a lover, ‘Queensborough Bridge’ at 5am after one of the worst phone calls of my entire life, ‘Kiss’ on day two of an ecstasy bender, ‘Cold Moon’ on Christmas Eve upstate, and ‘Max’ in July while we were dancing and I think, for the first time in a while, felt free.
I moved to New York because of the mythology of the city. Nan Goldin, David Armstrong, and Peter Hujar made me want to move here. Their photographs showed me the city could offer something different from life anywhere else – Sam Penn
I feel like the images are really saturated in the atmosphere of New York. How does the city influence and affect your photography? How do the images speak of desire?
Sam Penn: I moved to New York because of the mythology of the city. Nan Goldin, David Armstrong, and Peter Hujar made me want to move here. Their photographs showed me the city could offer something different from life anywhere else even if I couldn’t exactly put my finger on what that difference actually was. The reality upon arriving though, is that the city feels more hostile to those without financial or social support than it was for artists who lived here in the past. There is less space and less time for experimentation and failure. I’ve been here for almost eight years now, and I’ve noticed that for my friends and myself, survival feels so urgent.
My relationships have the tendency to slip into the extreme. Meeting people and having any kind of visceral emotional or physical experience can feel so precious and lucky, sometimes I think I have to hold on so tightly before the city crushes me and I have to leave or before I get lost in it and end up having to work in a way I do not want to. This comes out in my photographs, in the claustrophobia of a small apartment scene at night, in the hundreds of pictures of the same person who for a moment in time is my whole world because who or what else would be, in the detritus of a landscape of a place that is constantly rebuilding itself only to fall apart again, in the practice of shooting while my life is happening instead of making work after the fact. As I get older and hopefully gain more resources I am sure this way of working will shift, but for now it feels like the only way to do it.
As a photographer, is there anything that obsesses you? Are there any recurring themes in your work?
Sam Penn: I am easily obsessed with shooting a subject over and over again if we have a connection. I always hope a new photograph of someone can be even stronger than a previous one, and most of the time as my relationship with a subject strengthens, so do the photos I take of them.
Sam Penn’s Bad Behaviour is running until November 16, 2024, at Balice Hertling 47 Rue de Montmorency, Paris. The accompanying zine is published by New York Gallery Life and is available here now.