Love Songs - (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

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 holiday 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.

Review Quotes

Captures the complexity, risk and tenderness of love.-- "The New York Times Book Review"

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

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"

Thought-provoking exhibition 'Love Songs' is as much about what photography can't do as about what it can.--Arthur Lubow "The New York Times: Arts"

...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"