February 13, 2014

 

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/photobooth/2014/02/looking-at-love.html#slide_ss_0=14

Looking at Love

Posted by Jessie Wender

Is it possible to photograph love? Last Valentine’s Day, we pulled together a selection of photographers’ pictures of their own companions, lovers, and partners. This year, we focussed on photographers’ images of other couples—the work of looking at love, rather than being in it.

Looking at Love

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• Jill Knight, “Love and the Academy” (2013)
  Larry sent Daniel off to work on the morning I took this photograph in the same manner in which so many other people send their loved ones off each day. Larry with arms crossed and Daniel with coffee in hand, it was quick and casual. But this was a kiss between pioneers. In November, 2013, Daniel Lennox-Choate and Larry Lennox-Choate III became the first male West Point graduates to be married in a same-sex ceremony at the United States Military Academy’s Cadet Chapel. My favorite moments to photograph are those that are so intimate that I want to keep my camera glued close to my face, a barrier between myself and the love that’s happening in front of me. I’ll stay there, eye pressed to the viewfinder, waiting for that right moment and leaving it undisturbed. And then it happens, and that lovely and relatable moment is suspended in my frame.
• Kohei Yoshiyuki, “Untitled” (1972), from the series “The Park,” courtesy Yossi Milo Gallery
  This photograph is a record of the couple’s act rather than a description their love, so it is very difficult for me to speak about love while talking about this photo. But I can’t say this is not love. In the nineteen-seventies, at a park in Shinjuku, there were many young couples like this one, in the darkness. A woman and a man may have only just met. After having a drink, they walked around in a park, and then … It could be said that this is a preliminary step before a loving relationship. There are various forms of love.
• Lauren Fleishman, “Yevgeniy and Lyubov Kissin, Brooklyn, New York” (2009)
  This is an image from my series “Love Ever After,” which documents the love stories of couples that have been together more than five decades. I met the Kissins at a dance for seniors, and I immediately noticed Lyubov’s beautiful hair. Each time I tried to photograph another couple, she would pull me away, bringing the camera back to herself. She loved being photographed. Do I think it is possible to photograph love? Absolutely, I’m a romantic!
• Jana Romanova, from the series “Waiting” (2011)
  This is one of the first photographs I took for “Waiting,” which I worked on from 2009 through 2012, a series of photographs of young Russian couples expecting babies. My idea was to show the relationship without having the couple pose for the camera—photographing them early in the morning, sleeping in their bedroom. It was an attempt to get the idea of love into the photograph. When we sleep, we don’t really control what we are doing, but these unconscious moments are quite revealing.
• Leon Borensztein, “Couple with Baby, Bakersfield, CA” (1983), from the series “American Portraits” (1979-1989)
  Do I believe that love can be photographed? What love? I have very caring self-portraits with my disabled daughter—the love of father for his daughter is so obvious. Although I am cynic, I do believe that it’s possible to express love visually. All the images in this project were taken when I was working for a travelling studio; those are real customers, photographed all over U.S. Yes, I witnessed some love in front of my camera. At the time, I was going through a painful divorce, and seeing what I perceived as genuine love made me feel melancholic, often miserable, but also happy for the people I photographed. “How long will this last?,” I asked myself.
• Arnis Balcus, “Guys Kissing, Riga” (2002), from the series “Myself, Friends, Lovers and Others”
  Nowadays, these guys are well-known poets in Latvia. When I took this photograph, they had just started living together, their love was fresh and passionate, all I needed to do was press the button at the right time. When you are that much in love, you forget about the world around you, and about other people, including a photographer. This is when you, as a photographer, have a chance of capturing true love.
• Maika Elan, from the series “The Pink Choice”/MoST Artists“The Pink Choice” is a series of photographs about the love of homosexual couples. The project focusses on the living spaces, affectionate touches, and, more important, the synchronized rhythm of lovers sharing a life together. Viewers may not feel the personalities of the subjects in the photos, but hopefully they can feel the warmth of their love and caring. In the course of this project (eighteen months), the biggest thing I learned was to enjoy the present more. In Vietnam, gay couples live together illegally, and are stigmatized, so when they fall in love and have time together, they cherish that, and devote their energy to caring for each other.
• Sabine Mirlesse, “L & V” (2012) from the series “Preventricular Arrythmia”
  I started this series after a breakup, in 2010. At the time, I was so overwhelmed with the subject of happy and unhappy couples, and what that meant, that I decided to just give in to it. I began shooting in New York, and then Paris, often using the too-small apartments young couples find themselves sharing. The series developed from there, and it took the title of the diagnosis a cardiologist gave me for a heart condition, very common among young women in their twenties, in which you have extra heartbeats. As for what I’ve learned: in retrospect, whether or not a couple is still together perhaps matters less than the fact that at the time the picture was taken, there was love in the room.
• Lucy Levene, “Untitled” (2001), from the series “Come & Be My Baby”
  This series was born from a night out in Edinburgh, in the late nineties, and this particular image taken late one Saturday, is from a night club on the Lothian Road. I photographed people drinking, looking for love, sex, some sort of connection or interest. These were my contemporaries at the time, and the club was somewhere we might have gone. The series was a response to the loneliness that I felt these places induced. I think it’s possible to photograph a demonstration of love, or an expression of love. But I think that photography is often driven by desire—by longing or loss rather than by love.
• Sage Sohier, “Stephanie and Monica, Boston, MA” (1987)
  This picture is from my series “At Home with Themselves: Same-Sex Couples in 1980’s America.” From 1986 to 1988, I photographed over a hundred gay and lesbian couples and conducted extensive interviews with them. I feel privileged to have been let in on this private, intimate moment. I don’t feel like a voyeur but, rather, like I’m being included in this special realm. It’s moving, and it makes me reflect on my own experience of intimacy. “Love” is a tough one to photograph. I certainly think it’s possible to photograph intimacy, and to make pictures that give a visceral and tender sense of touch.
• Molly Landreth, “Meg and Renee, Seattle, WA” (2007)
  This image is from my series “Embodiment: A Portrait of Queer Life in America,” which I photographed primarily between 2004 and 2010. Each image in this body of work is like a love letter to and about my subjects, as well as the larger queer community that we work together to represent. I think that the caption, written by the friends in this image, proves that it is possible to photograph love, in it’s many complex and subtle forms. “Looking back at this photograph, I feel a sense of calm happiness remembering a night driving around aimlessly in the world we’d created for ourselves, far from home, in the quiet darkness of a lakeside parking lot sitting next to someone you love and have grown up with, chilly and nestled together with our eyes shut, trying to stay still while flashes burst all around. While living in the Midwest, we were often the only community we had. Now, grown up, we continue to be close friends and to learn from each other. At the time this was taken, it just seemed like a fun weeknight project, now in a frame on a wall it reminds us both of that moment in time and how amazing it is to know someone whose shoulder you can rest your life upon.”
• Laura Letinsky, “Untitled (Sara and Jeff—Window)” (1993), courtesy Yancey Richardson Gallery
  The photograph is from a series on coupledom, “Venus Inferred.” I made it during a time that I now look back at as being young, romantic, and impossible. I was struggling to articulate scenes of love that were more realistic, less mired in mainstream expectations while simultaneously aware of the inescapability of ideas and ideals of love. These photographs are depictions of love in that they are fraught with ambivalence, hope, gloriousness, and ordinariness.
• Keliy Anderson Staley, “Mikael and Melaena” (2009)
  This image is from a long-term series of wet-plate collodion portraits of couples. The couple in this image are my friends Mikael, a photographer, and Melaena, a musician, who got married a few years after this picture was taken. I use antique lenses with shallow depths of field, with only a narrow plane of the image in focus (often just the eyes). With couples, this means they must be nearly in line with each other, which can lead to awkward results but also to complex relationships between the two bodies. The exposures are quite long, often thirty seconds or so. In order to stay still for the duration of the exposure, the subjects must lean into each other, using one another for support. These are portraits of individuals as much as they are of couples. I’m not sure that it’s possible to photograph love, but a photograph can potentially reveal a couple’s stability, their ease with each other, and an understanding of one another that comes through in the way they hold each other.
• Ute Klein, from the series “Resonanzgeflechte—leibhafter Raum” (2009)
  Ten years ago, I fell in love with my partner. But, soon after we started our relationship, our lives pulled us in different directions, and we ended up in a long-distance relationship. It was heartbreaking to be in love but be apart, and it made me question the general idea of relationship. Why do people decide to be together? What does it mean when they are actually apart? What do we expect from our relationships? What roles do they play in our lives? With this in mind, I started exploring the very general aspects of love and partnership. I wanted to depict relationships in their complex and multilayered facets, transforming them into sculptural-looking figures, in strange and ambiguous poses, with colorful surfaces. I do believe that it’s possible to find ways to photograph love, as I believe that a relationship can survive hard times. Sometimes, it just needs to be looked at differently to be better understood.