LOVE SONGS: PHOTOGRAPHY AND INTIMACY - SIMON BAKER, DAVID LITTLE, FREDERIQUE DOLIVET, PASCAL HOEEL, LAURIE HURWITZ

LOVE SONGS: PHOTOGRAPHY AND INTIMACY
Simon Baker, David Little, Frederique Dolivet, Pascal Hoeel, Laurie Hurwitz
208 pages
ISBN: 9781636811178

How photographers from Nan Goldin to Leigh Ledare have portrayed intimacy and eros between themselves and their subjects.

Through the myriad lens of intimate relationships, Love Songs brings together series dating from 1952 to 2022 by some of the leading photographers of our time that explore love, desire and intimacy in all their complex and contradictory ways. The book is conceived and organized in the fashion of mixtapes, music compilations exchanged between lovers. Among the major series reproduced here are Nobuyoshi Araki's Sentimental Journey (1969) and Winter Journey (1989-90), which present the beginning and end of the relationship with his wife Yoko, from their honeymoon to her death; Nan Goldin's seminal 1986 photobook The Ballad of Sexual Dependency; RongRong and inri's tender and poetical Polaroid series Personal Letters (2000); and Leigh Ledare's Double Bind (2010), a complex account of a love triangle between himself, his ex-wife and her new husband. These and the other series in Love Songs together make a portrait of love in all its mess, risk, complexity, sensuality and tenderness.

Photographers include: Nobuyoshi Araki, Motoyuki Daifu, Nan Goldin, Emmet Gowin, Ren Groebli, Herv Guibert, Sheree Hovsepian, Clifford Prince King, Leigh Ledare, Lin Zhipeng, Sally Mann, RongRong and inri, Collier Schorr, Hideka Tonomura and Karla Hiraldo Voleau.