Lover to lover: photographers most intimate images in pictures | Art and design

 Posted on April 7, 2024  |  4 minutes  |  847 words  |  Chauncey Koziol

Lover to lover: photographers’ most intimate images – in pictures

A new exhibition features photographic love stories, from the first rush of an affair to the pain of separation

Main image: ‘A love story turned to tragedy’ … Sentimental Journey, 1971. Photograph: Nobuyoshi Araki, Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery

Thu 20 Jul 2023 07.00 BST

  • Sheree Hovsepian, Cultured Pearl, 2021

    A new group exhibition features intensely personal photographs taken by lovers. It includes series dating as far back as 1952 by some of the leading and emerging photographers of our time. Taking us through often unseen stories of different couples – from the first days of an affair through marriages, honeymoons, domestic bliss and the pain of separation, even to death and the last days shared – the intimacies depicted by these artists are rarely seen. Love Songs Photography & Intimacy runs until 11 Sept 2023 at ICP New York

  • Nobuyoshi Araki, Sentimental Journey, 1971

    Araki’s landmark book Sentimental Journey, first produced in 1971, reveals a visual diary of his honeymoon with his wife, Yoko. The Love Songs exhibition catalogue is available here

  • Aikaterini Gegisian, Handbook of the Spontaneous Other

    Gegisian’s series of photographic collages on paper include found pop culture materials from the 1960s and 1970s, such as adult magazines, travel journals and National Geographic. Gegisian’s process of ‘de-collaging’ rebels against and emancipates commodified and fetishised images

  • Nobuyoshi Araki, Sentimental Journey, 1971

    In 1989, Araki produced another book, Winter Journey, which documents the final months of Yoko’s life until her death at 42. Placing his own life at the centre of the work, Araki blurs the lines between moments of intimacy and insignificance, as the love story transforms into a tragedy

  • René Groebli, from The Eye of Love, 1952

    Groebli brings the viewer inside the domestic and romantic space of a Paris honeymoon. Lazy days in a hotel room are chronicled with deep and loving closeness, as if he wished to remember every second of time spent together, his wife dressing and undressing, the unmade bed, a bottle of wine on a table, her hand holding a lit cigarette

  • Clifford Prince King, Conditions, 2018

    Prince King’s works celebrate queer Black love and Black liberation, disrupting norms of culture, gender, identity and race

  • Hervé Guibert, Sienne, 1979

    Guibert met Thierry Jouno in 1976. His series Thierry chronicles their passionate 15-year relationship. The photographs of Jouno in hotel rooms during their travels are sensual portraits in which he reveres his lover’s nude body

  • Clifford Prince King, Lovers in a Field, 2019

    Prince King’s intimate colour photographs, some staged, depict private spaces inspired by and drawn from real and imagined moments in his life and community

  • Sally Mann, Hephaestus, 2008

    Mann’s series Proud Flesh documents her husband Larry’s late-onset muscular dystrophy, creating images of great vulnerability, frailty, tenderness and mortality. Titled for the Greek god of blacksmiths (Larry’s profession), the marks on the image evoke scars, and other works have a feeling of forensic documents

  • RongRong&inri, from Personal Letters, 2000

    Personal Letters marks the first chapter of the love story of RongRong&inri, the working name of two artists. The lovers embarked on an impassioned correspondence from September through November 2000, mailing each other photographs with promises of eternal love handwritten with ardour on the borders of the prints, expressing the intensity of their emotions and their desire to be together forever

  • Collier Schorr, Angel Zinovieff (Felt, Fingers, Socks), 2021

    Schorr collaborated with Angel Zinovieff, who writes: ‘When I look at you with the camera in your hand looking at me, there is a difference between that and what I see when the camera is not present. It is different because the camera is a third presence, a witness.’ In Angel Z, the two artists work together to explore the traditions of the muse along with intimacy, visibility and performance’

  • Karla Hiraldo Voleau, from the series Another Love Story, 2022

    The artist re-stages photographs from a former relationship with a man known, in this context, only as X. After discovering that he had been leading a double life and living with another woman, Voleau cast a model to play the role of X and visited locations where they had spent time together to reenact intimate moments from their relationship before the moment of betrayal
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