Photography byMax Henry

I’m not necessarily a person who engages in much casual nudity myself, but casual nudity is a huge aspect of my work.

Probably one of the biggest themes that has come out in my photography is shame. I’m someone who has been in recovery from depression, anxiety, and disordered eating for a decade at this point, and a big factor in all of those things was a long relationship with shame around my sexuality. Shame about being gay, shame about being kinky, shame stemming from a sexual assault in high school.

Being able to create images that channel my sexuality as a gay man has helped me to process a lot of those difficult emotions and experiences. Additionally, being able to capture and celebrate different body types and characteristics has helped with my own relationship to my body and self-image.

Usually, I find models via social media. I will often reach out to people I’m interested in photographing, but I also have people reach out to me. Recently, I’ve been getting more involved with the queer art community in Brooklyn, and it’s been nice to meet people and network in person rather than just online.

The choice to go into people’s homes to shoot was first and foremost a budgetary decision, haha. Professionally, I’m a social worker in NYC, so the amount of money I have to put towards my photography can be strained. As I’ve gone on, I’ve prioritized investing money in my art while also being budget-conscious. My partner and I moved to Pleasantville in January, and now I have a studio space in our basement. I’m still working on getting it set up how I want, but it gives me more opportunity to use backgrounds and props, whereas in the past I would rent a studio by the hour if I had a bigger plan or vision for a shoot.

Something else that I do like about photographing people in their own spaces is having them feel more comfortable. I tend to photograph people who don’t often model, so I use a lot of my communication skills as a social worker to help people feel calm and present. I really strive in my work to capture people when they are feeling most themselves, and being in their environment is another way to get closer to that.

It is! When I started taking pictures in college, I mostly was photographing myself. At that time, I was using self-portraiture as a way to process my relationship to my body as I started recovery from my eating disorder. One of the photos in this series is a self-portrait I took in a very pivotal time in my life, the summer between when I realized I needed and wanted to recover and when I actually started seeking treatment.

When I started photographing other people a couple years ago, it became very important to me that I actively seek out models of different perspectives and experiences. I still have some progress to make in terms of representation, but it’s also very important to me that it not be tokenizing or make people feel “othered.” I’m a bigger guy myself, and I’ve been that way for most of my life. So often in the gay community, white, cis, muscular, and able-bodied people are held up as the most important. My goal is to highlight all types of bodies equally, and to make both models and viewers feel more confident about their value as sexual beings despite what other messaging is out there.

I have always been a kinky person, and I’ve also always had a lot of shame about it. My most recent therapist (shoutout to Mike) has really supported me the last few years in challenging that shame and finding a way to own my kinkiness. I started taking more pictures with kink as the theme, and it helped me to find community with others and also continue speaking outwardly about my kink rather than keeping it inside.