Intimate stories of love, loss and bliss

Imag­ine, if you will, the his­to­ry of pho­tog­ra­phy told through the lens of love. This is the start­ing point for Love Songs: Pho­tog­ra­phy and Inti­ma­cy, a trav­el­ing exhi­bi­tion and book fea­tur­ing the work of pho­tog­ra­phers includ­ing Nobuyoshi Ara­ki, Nan Goldin, Sal­ly Mann, Col­lier Schorr, and Leigh Ledare that explore the ten­der com­plex­i­ties of love, loss, and bliss. 

Draw­ing inspi­ra­tion from Goldin’s sem­i­nal The Bal­lad of Sex­u­al Depen­den­cy and Araki’s land­mark Sen­ti­men­tal Jour­ney, Love Songs embraces rad­i­cal inti­ma­cy between pho­tog­ra­ph­er, sub­ject, and view­er in a shared moment of pro­found trust, care, and vulnerability. 

Con­ceived by Simon Bak­er as a mix­tape that con­jures the visions of para­mours exchang­ing their deep­est desires through an exquis­ite­ly curat­ed playlist of songs, Love Songs now trav­els to the Inter­na­tion­al Cen­ter of Pho­tog­ra­phy, where guest cura­tor Sara Raza remix­es the visu­al playlist to give it a decid­ed­ly New York twist.

Dri­ven by her inter­est in recon­tex­tu­al­iz­ing and inter­twin­ing his­to­ries, engag­ing with alter­na­tive real­i­ties and polit­i­cal imag­in­ings, Raza intro­duces the works of Aika­teri­ni Gegisian, Clif­ford Prince King, Sheree Hov­sepi­an, Ergin Çavuşoğlu, and Fouad Elk­our to explore themes of desire, con­tra­dic­tion, col­li­sion, dis­tor­tion, real­i­ty, and after­math. While romance forms the cen­tral heart of the exhi­bi­tion, it also inte­grates ele­ments of kin­ship across fam­i­ly, friend­ship, part­ner­ship, and com­mu­ni­ty to con­sid­er the intri­cate­ly lay­ered roots of love that shape our dai­ly lives. 

“Love Songs inter­twines real and fic­tion­al nar­ra­tives that tra­verse local, glob­al, and dig­i­tal realms,” says Raza. ​“The works on view can be seen as sub­ver­sive artis­tic pro­pos­als for explor­ing notions of love and its recipients.”

Raza points to the work of Clif­ford Prince King, which cel­e­brates queer Black love while bear­ing wit­ness to chang­ing and divid­ed soci­eties. ​“With­in the con­text of US his­to­ry, these pho­tographs also shed light on broad­er social issues sur­round­ing the strug­gle for Black lib­er­a­tion and the occu­pa­tion of pub­lic space and time,” she says.

Artist Sheree Hov­sepi­an, orig­i­nal­ly from Iran, cre­ates mixed-media assem­blages with her sis­ter as pro­tag­o­nist that med­i­tate on the frag­ment­ed female body. ​“These works not only evoke notions of kin­ship and resem­blance but also hold a mir­ror to Ori­en­tal­ist fan­tasies that have had an unfor­tu­nate ten­den­cy of eroti­ciz­ing or mythol­o­giz­ing the female form,” Raza explains.

“Love Songs embraces a nos­tal­gic qual­i­ty, cap­tur­ing the inter­play of var­i­ous fre­quen­cies and ener­gies that inter­twine and encap­su­late the enig­mat­ic nature of love,” says Raza. ​“There is a poet­ic res­o­nance in this exhi­bi­tion in con­sid­er­ing the con­nec­tion between the mixed tape anal­o­gy and pho­tog­ra­phy. Both serve as repos­i­to­ries that hold and shape our mem­o­ries, and can be revis­it­ed and reimagined.”

Love Songs: Pho­tog­ra­phy and Inti­ma­cy is on view through Sep­tem­ber 11, 2023 at the Inter­na­tion­al Cen­ter of Pho­tog­ra­phy in New York. The cat­a­logue is pub­lished by ICP/DAP.

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