Maxwell Harvey-Sampson is a queer photographer and writer based in Ithaca, NY. Fueled by an interest in the queerness of art history, Maxwell’s work is highly referential. Going as far back as the renaissance era, Maxwell’s artistic style pulls from different art periods, allowing for the iconization, queering, and recontextualization of formerly cis-hetero narratives A champion of both digital and analog processes, much of his early work was created in pursuit of a social document. Originally from a small town in Pennsylvania, Maxwell is driven by his survival of predominantly xenophobic, heteronormative spaces to celebrate shared queer histories and stories.
Maxwell’s writing offers levity, irreverence, and humility to his internal conditions. He often writes of the adversities/oddities of piloting a tensile, dualistic, and manic depressive human body that seeks pacification. He is currently writing a memoir about his experience being incarcerated during a manic episode.
Maxwell is a 2017 Smithsonian Magazine Finalist and a 2022-2024 Creatives Rebuild New York Fellow. Maxwell holds a BFA from The Rochester Institute of Technology and is currently a Cornell University Image Text MFA candidate.
Photo by Patrick Carew