DESCRIPTIONS

How photographers from Nan Goldin to Leigh Ledare have portrayed intimacy and eros between themselves and their subjects. A New York Times Book Review 2023 gift guide pick.

Love Songs brings together series dating from 1952 to 2022 by established and emerging contemporary photographers that explore love, desire and intimacy in all their complex and contradictory ways. Among the major series reproduced here are Nan Goldin’s seminal 1986 photobook The Ballad of Sexual Dependency; 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; RongRong & 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 risk, complexity, sensuality and tenderness.

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

REVIEWS

“...conceived as a mixtape of songs gifted to a lover...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 most complex and contradictory ways...” —All About Photo

“If photography is the undisputed medium of testimony, capable of describing the world, landscapes, wars, and even everyday life, what is its potential when it comes to showing the feeling of love, and thus the invisible and the impalpable?” —Sophie Bernard, Blind

“Thought-provoking exhibition…'Love Songs’ is as much about what photography can’t do as about what it can.” —Arthur Lubow, New York Times: Arts

“Love Songs offers a subtler, more expansive take on how photography can be used to create, sustain, and destroy intimacy in its many forms.” —Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, Aperture

“Love Songs embraces radical intimacy between photographer, subject, and viewer in a shared moment of profound trust, care, and vulnerability.” —Miss Rosen, Huck

“Captures the complexity, risk and tenderness of love.” —New York Times Book Review

From the Art Book D.A.P Blog:

CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 7/6/2023

Taking its cues from the making and gifting of mixtapes, 'Love Songs' is new from ICP & D.A.P.

Featured spreads—featuring work by Nan Goldin, Nobuyoshi Araki and Karla Hiraldo Voleau—are from Love Songs: Photography and Intimacy, published to accompany the contemporary photography survey on view now at ICP. “As a compilation, Love Songs takes its cues from the making and gifting of mixtapes, common between lovers who came of age during the 1980s and early 1990s,” curator Sara Raza writes. “These much-beloved leftovers of the late analog era stitched together words and music to create a harmonious whole, intent on transmitting certain frequencies via ‘airwaves’ of emotions, moods or feelings between the sender and the receiver. Mixtapes served as endearing objects of aural affection intended to be played and replayed, paused, rewound or fast-forwarded—all with the push of a button. … In hindsight, mixtapes, like the medium of photography, can also be thought of as databanks where the details of memories are stored and managed. As such they represent the complex entanglement of desires that couple, contradict and splice through thoughts and recollections as fragments that capture the elusive qualities of love.”