Sam Morris was a Tumblr kid. Probably still is at heart. The platform was where he developed and honed his eye for aesthetics, and where he began to cultivate an audience. He still credits Tumblr as the place that he really came to understand imagery. But now, since the service's ban on adult content, the photographer and former professional dancer has moved on.
Last month during Pride in New York City, Morris hosted the first solo exhibition of his work in a one-day pop up. For the occasion, he curated a small collection of images and video from his "Other Boys & Lovers" series that he's been previously sharing on his personal website. The imagery was raw, intimate, at times delicate, but always personal--according to the Britain, it was a peak into his life over the last year. It also reflected a maturation of his knack for photography, something he has cradled since he was a child as his mom was a photographer, and all throughout his life as it at times served as a side hustle.
Though we could not show the exhibition in full -- sadly we do not show erect penises on the Out website, no matter the artistic context -- we have curated a selection of the work here. Alongside it, Morris explains how Berlin helped him confront his ideas around sex and what its like to be an artist who relies on the ever-fickle Instagram.
When we were talking before you told me that you couldn’t have made this project without Berlin. Can you talk me through that?
I travel a lot around the world. I grew up in London so I'm like a city boy anyway and I spent time in New York, Paris, Barcelona, and Madrid. But when I moved to Berlin it turned my outlook on sex and love and relationships in a really dramatic way. That influenced my work in ways and I didn't even realize, just because I experienced things there I never experienced before. It's an extremely hedonistic city, yes, but it's also very progressive in terms of relationships and what we need from love and sex and the relationship between the two.
The moment I took the work to New York for my exhibition and sat back and looked at it, I realized it looked like Berlin. I really couldn't have created the work anywhere else.
Can you talk to me about some of the thoughts Berlin changed for you?
I'm from London which is one of the world's most progressive cities, but it still is very traditional in terms of British values. So my own values toward sex were always quite conservative in a way, which seems pretty ironic considering who I am and what I do. There's an underground sex culture and the chem sex parties, but I think those are because of this culture of hiding sexuality in fact. But Berlin is very out there and respectful. Everyone is respectful of your need for sex and your desire to explore what you want to explore. So that's why at most of the parties in Berlin you're not allowed to have your phone, or you have to put stickers over the camera because they really want to encourage this exploration in these safe spaces. So you can have a normal 9 to 5 job but when you go out you can just be whatever you want to be without judgement.
So when I got there I spent a few months delving into it and it was just something I had never experienced before. You know, just being able to disappear into a dark room and come out hours later having had this life changing, hedonistic experience.
That’s important because before Berlin, explicit sex wasn’t a part of your work really was it?
Right, it wasn't as explicit before. But while I was there having these experiences, I got to the point of: I don't give a fuck any more. I'm not scared of sex. Berlin gave me that. So this "Other Boys & Lovers" series is about capturing and showing the raw, gritty, explicit sex and then also the vulneraility of the loneliness that comes from that and with that as well. Because when you're walking home along after like getting gangbanged in a dark room you have very mixed feelings. Like you can think that was fucking amazing but there's a sense of loneliness because you're working out what your relationship is with sex in a way and it's not always light.
So in the series you see some of these shots that are like these really hard dicks that can be looked at as sort of obnoxious, because sex can be obnoxious sometimes, and then other tiems a real sensitivity. So that might be between two people or alone. As gay people, I think we feel extremely sensitive in ourselves and we all have our struggles that are individual to our personal experiences. Those things can be magnified when you have the extremes of sex and love. Right after that the feelings of loneliness can become way more palpable. For me, in Berlin everything became more heightened.
Before this a lot of the work you were doing was sort of this exploration of the selfie right?
Yeah. A lot of that is still on my site. There's me and then when I started shooting other boys who are my lovers. Now there's that that's on my site and then there's me. So I never really stopped doing the self portraits but I do it a little less. A lot of that was me taking what I learned from Tumblr and fashion and applying it to something more erotic.
Do you plan to do more in person exhibitions?
Definitely. You know this was my first solo show. It was really to introduce myself in that sense because everything I've done has been mostly behind a paywall on my site so a lot of people haven't actually seen my work if they haven't paid for it. I wanted to keep it that way because it keeps it sort of protected and a little more elusive for a while. But having it tangible like that in a room was really special for me because it made it feel real.
But also when your work exists online it can be taken out of the context you meant it for and easily made into like a meme or something else. That’s harder to do when it’s a physical exhibit.
Exactly. Also everyone who came was already curious about my work anyway. So it was a safe space for me in that sense.
But I've had to struggle with memes and stuff recently. Particularly after Tumblr came down and I had to move to Twitter. It's sort of like you're thrown into the lion's den and now you're a meme or you're down a rabbit's hole of straight Twitter and it's like that's not who I made this for but my work is being ridiculed by these people. It feels lowest common denominator in those instances. I think most of the time when you're using an artist's work to make a meme out of it, it's tacky.
On the flipside, your success comes from your internet platform, which can be wiped away when something like your Instagram being taken down days before your exhibit, happened.
That was crazy. You can't make stuff like that up. Two days before my exhibition my Instagram got taken down. Having the exhibition actually got me through the account being taken down. I felt like I was breaking through it and becoming a real person in real life, the stuff I was creating was finally becoming tangible. When you're creating and doing things just online, sometimes you feel like it's not real, like I'm not a real thing, not a real person, not a real artist. So the show was a thing that was like "no this is real."
But it's definitely a minefield, not knowing when you're going to be taken down by another platform or Apple or something. I I had to literally beg and plead to get my Instagram back and they said I was taken down for sexual solicitation which is ... very vague. Their definition is very vague and so I just kept saying I'm not an escort so I don't know what I was soliciting anywhere. But it's all done by algorithms anyway, those decisions aren't made by real people.
But it did make me realize how much I rely on it. I did not like the feeling of relying on Instagram that much. I've always been someone who always does what I want to do and be my own boss, so to have someone take that away from me and then lose my voice, I realized I had no control. And it was the second time in a month and those were the first times I had been taken down.
