Love Songs: Photography and Intimacy | ICP
Rong Rong&inri, from Personal Letters, 2000. Hand-annotated gelatin silver print. ©
RongRong&inri
Written by Eloise King-Clements
The International Center of Photography (ICP) presents 250 photographs taken by, and of, lovers. This summer, Love Songs tells the weaving stories of love, love affairs, and what remains when love is lost. However, for an exhibition about love, it won’t have you skipping out of ICP’s doors, smiling ear-to-ear, ready to make like Tommy Kha—or, more aptly, Alfred Eisenstaedt—and kiss a stranger. No, it’s a show about the tenderness, the devastation, and perhaps even the naivety of love. The group exhibition showcases work from Nan Goldin, Nobuyoshi Araki, Hervé Guibert, Clifford Prince King, Sally Mann, Collier Schorr and more, bringing tales of honeymoons, cancer diagnoses, impending heartbreak, artists scorned, and domestic bliss. The exhibit is photography at its best: sublime images with underbellies that reveal stories of love’s endurance.
Hervé Guibert, Sienne, 1979. Collection MEP, Paris. © Christine Guibert, courtesy Les Douches la
Galerie, Paris
The canonical oeuvre of Nan Goldin and Nobuyoshi Araki inspires the show. Fitting perfectly with the curation, Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1985) is a series that explores the labyrinthian dynamics of lovers and friends as their city morphed and the AIDS crisis devastated the world. The Ballad is a love song in itself to the queer community in New York during the late 70s and 80s and serves as a jumping off point into ICP’s exhibit.
A selection from Nobuyoshi Araki’s monumental books Sentimental Journey (1971), diaristic photographs from his honeymoon with his new wife, Yoko, and Winter Journey (1989-1990), a series taken in the final months of Yoko’s life, are displayed. We are seamlessly brought into Araki’s emotional landscape. In one frame Yoko is curled up in a gingham dress amidst newlywed joy; in the next we see hospital beds and IV tubes. He offers a captivating, front-row seat to a brilliant and devastating love story, ending with the lasting image of Yoko cocooned by flowers in a coffin.
Sally Mann, Semaphore, 2003. © Sally Mann. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian
It should be noted: the show might inspire an impulse to call your ex, to hash out those issues— we had something good here! Ignore these thoughts. It may be the trance of Collier Schorr—her black and white portraits of Angel Zinovieff, the collaboration entitled Angel Z (2020-2021), reminds you of the tender beginning of love. In one portrait, Angel crouches nude, clutching the wooden leg of a table and stares, almost childlike, and slightly mournfully, back at you. It evokes a nostalgia for the beginning of love: the part where everything is playful and raw. Angel’s piercing eyes seem to ask the fundamental question: if I reveal myself to you, will you still love me? Schorr draws these thoughts, a whole tableau of emotions, through her domestic snapshots.
Collier Schorr, Angel Zinovieff (Felt, Fingers, Socks), 2021. © Collier Schorr, Courtesy 303
Gallery, New York
The tender black and white portraits of Thierry (1976-1991) tell a fifteen-year love story by French writer and photographer, Herve Guibert, and his partner, Thierry Jouno. One image frames Theirry’s body slumped at a desk with daylight seeping through an antique window as cigarette smoke lazily dances above his torso as if it’s emanating from his body. The sweaty malaise of summer mixed with their quest for authenticity and freedom is palpable. Accompanying selections from Thierry, Clifford Prince King’s work celebrating queer Black love is shown, too. One striking image shows a Black man holding a peony and knife, staring beyond the camera. And this “beyond-ness” he cites as a point of inspiration. His work is steeped in history while flirting with the future.
Aikaterini Gegisian, Handbook of the Spontaneous Other (Blue 4), 2019 © Aikaterini Gegisian
The collection, curated by Sara Raza, embraces photographers occupying the liminal space between past and present, with hints hidden in plain sight. Handbook of the Spontaneous Other is a 2019 photographic collage by Aikaterini Gegisian. Gegisian uses 1960s and 1970s pop culture momentos and detritus—photographs from an array of magazines like National Geographic and adult magazines—to do the process of what Gegisian calls “de-collaging”: unlinking fetishized images with their origin and consequently breathing new life into archival media. Gegisian uses found images to recreate meaning, while in Karla Hiraldo Voleau’s Another Love Story (2021), she casts a model to stand in as an ex-boyfriend to recreate memories of intimate moments they shared, and to grapple with his ultimate betrayal. And, in Silent Glide (2008), Ergin Çavuşoğlu uses a three-screen video installation to consider the looming end of a relationship.
Clifford Prince King, Lovers in a Field, 2019. © Clifford Prince King, Courtesy STARS, Los
Angeles
Love Songs is a symphony of an exhibition. It is in collaboration with the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), Paris, and based upon an original idea by Simon Baker and curated by Frédérique Dolivet and Pascal Hoël. David E. Little, Executive Director of ICP, posits: “This major exhibition offers a unique viewpoint into how relationships are photographed and present images of intimacy rarely represented in photographic history with such openness and directness.”
The exhibition reveres both the surface, the beauty, and the redolence of the photographic image while encouraging and evoking the intangible stories of love from each photographer. Through snapshots, moving images, camouflaging, and “de-collaging,” ICP’s Love Songs brings a personal history to love, captured and packaged, while embracing the many deviations and iterations that love may assume.
