Taking its name from Mary Gaitskill’s infamous 1980s short story collection Bad Behavior, Sam Penn’s new exhibition is “a study of the relationships between landscapes, portraiture, and bodies”
In Mary Gaitskill’s 1980s collection of short stories, Bad Behavior, New York City provides an unbeautiful backdrop to razor-sharp tales of desire, where characters tangle in sadomasochistic relationships, drug-fuelled affairs, and inflict all kinds of cruelties upon one another. Causing a sensation upon its release, the power of the book isn’t the nature of its unlikely trysts but the flooring precision of how Gaitskill writes her characters and the ways their fantasies prevent them from seeing each other clearly. One place this feels particularly stark is in A Romantic Weekend, a story of an extramarital BDSM getaway gone awry: “How, she thought miserably, had she mistaken this hostile moron for the dark, brooding hero who would crush her like an insect and then talk about life and art?” A few pages later, “He was beginning to see her as a locked garden he could sneak into and sit in for days, tearing the heads off flowers.”
New York-based photographer Sam Penn has read a lot of Mary Gaitskill over the past 12 months as she has been shooting a charged new series, which is currently on view at Balice Hertling gallery in Paris. While the series borrows its name from the author’s caustic book – Bad Behavior – Penn has chosen not to reveal any specifics about her images and the people in them, beyond the fact her subjects are individuals close to her and that the project documents a shift in her romantic life. “The show and zine are ultimately about the end of one relationship and the beginning of another, and the emotional states and effects on my friendships that came in between,” she tells AnOther. “The year was full of a lot of change, and I started to question things that I once thought were constant.”
Penn moved to New York from Philadelphia eight years ago to study film at the Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts. Rather than fussing with the technicalities of equipment and lighting, her work as a photographer favours a direct approach in the vein of Corinne Day or Nan Goldin, capturing moments of connection in bedrooms and city streets with a Contax T3 camera she never goes anywhere without.
Her first zine, Some Girls – a play on Robert Mapplethorpe’s Some Women – gathered devotional portraits of her closest female friendships, springboarding her into working for fashion brands like Vaquera and Balenciaga following its publication last year. Bad Behavior, Penn says, goes in a different direction. “I think in the past, the work was about freezing a moment in time and making a really beautiful image of the person that was in front of me,” she says. “This work is more personal. It’s more about myself now.”
While Gaitskill’s themes of pain and intimacy are felt in Penn’s intense shots, it was actually a literary device the author used – to reconstruct memory in flashes of connected imagery – that interested the photographer most. Penn used this device to inspire a “psychological sequence” where a concise series of nine images are meant to be experienced as one work. Tacked up to the wall, unframed in the narrow gallery space, the resulting show sees grey landscapes bleed into vivid portraits – a particularly beautiful shot captures a young woman smoking in a car – interspersed with a blur of dimly-lit bedroom scenes, such as a vagina shot up close and bare skin ready to be spanked. “When I approached this show, I really wanted to use it as a space for a formal exercise,” she explains. “It’s a study of the relationships between landscapes, portraiture, and bodies.”
Approaching the exhibition with a formality has allowed Penn to create something of a protective barrier between herself and the public as it goes on view. “These experiences are really personal and quite intimate, I really don’t want to give too much away about that direct experience,” she explains. “It’s really scary to put out there but I’m also confident that it’s images at the end of the day, it’s not a diary. In the moments that felt most in flux, the photographs were a reminder that I could make fixed images that exist beyond myself.” Another helpful barrier has been exhibiting the show a ten-hour flight away from the place the photos were taken. “It was interesting opening it during fashion week because a lot of people from New York were actually in Paris, and my friends got to see it, which was cool,” she says. “But at the end of the day, it’s shown in Paris, and it almost kind of stays in Paris.”
Bad Behavior by Sam Penn is on show at Balice Hertling in Paris until 16 November 2024. An accompanying zine is published by New York Life Gallery.