By Alesandra Schade

A crowded bar, an 80’s anthem echoing – you lock eyes across the room and feel the excitement flutter in your stomach, as they weave through the human-limbed obstacles to get to you. Any Nicholas Sparks book will sell you the same story – whether it’s sitting on a park bench in your new spring outfit, picking up a bagel at your neighborhood deli, or dashing across the street and knocking into some ruggedly handsome stranger – love at first sight is coming for you. Flash forward, and the story that love is stumbling around the corner waiting to crash into you is unfairly halted as surgical masks are pulled on and your playground is suddenly your bedroom.

During a time of extreme social isolation, humans are using the internet to seek connection. Be it through online gaming communities, your social network on Instagram, or dating services – people are increasingly reaching out to each other digitally. While many single millennials might have already had dating apps downloaded to their phone previous to the novel corona-virus, now more than ever before, users are plugging in, updating their profiles and swiping into the endless void of potential partners.

As the pandemic has confined us to our apartments and homes, dating apps are adjusting, and taking advantage of this time. Hinge has rolled out “Date From Home,” a feature that lets users launch a video chat if both people agree to the call. Tinder's Passport feature lets you connect with singles all over the world.

As the landscape of finding connection is changing, photographers are documenting this transformation. Kirra Cheers, an Australia-born visual artist, and Marie Hyld, a Copenhagen-based photographer, used online dating websites and apps as their inspiration to shoot. Navigating the boundaries of the intimate and the anonymous, they photographed scenes using their dates as subjects.

Kirra Cheerswent on seventeen first dates using Tinder, and took portraits of her companions. The resulting body of work is a statement on 21st century dating, hoping people will “look beyond the voyeuristic appeal and see it as a social commentary on how we connect with one another in a digital world.”

Photographer Marie Hyld, after years of swiping, scrolling, and double-tapping her way through an endless feed of "polished" posts, the 24-year-old photographer set out to find something more genuine. Each photo is a staged scene of her and her date posing intimately, marked with the amount of time they had spent together. “Inspired by human intimacy and driven by curiosity of manicured realities, I decided to explore the realm of depicting situations and choosing perspectives on reality,” Marie says. The pictures are real, she says, and the situations may even contain a glimpse of something genuine. Her work blurs the lines of fiction and reality, and illustrates the power of intimate connections.