Foreword by David Little. Text by Simon Baker, Sara Raza. Contributions by Frédérique Dolivet, Pascal Höel, Laurie Hurwitz, Clothilde Morette.
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.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
All About Photo
...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...
Blind
Sophie Bernard
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?
The New York Times: Arts
Arthur Lubow
Thought-provoking exhibition…'Love Songs’ is as much about what photography can’t do as about what it can.
Aperture
Kaelen Wilson-Goldie
Love Songs offers a subtler, more expansive take on how photography can be used to create, sustain, and destroy intimacy in its many forms.
Huck
Miss Rosen
Love Songs embraces radical intimacy between photographer, subject, and viewer in a shared moment of profound trust, care, and vulnerability.
The New York Times Book Review
Captures the complexity, risk and tenderness of love.
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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.” continue to blog
Clifford Prince King’s “The Backyard” (2019) is reproduced from Love Songs: Photography and Intimacy, the International Center of Photography’s new survey featuring work by fifteen established and emerging photographers including Nobuyoshi Araki, Nan Goldin, Leigh Ledare, Collier Schorr and King, among others. “Clifford Prince King’s documentary-style color photographs are anchored in the artist’s celebration of queer Black love and bear witness to changing and divided societies,” Sara Raza writes. “In the context of US history, King’s photographs highlight wider social topics concerning the struggle for Black liberation and public space and time. Challenging the spaces that were long dominated by colonial male heterosexual desires and influences, King subverts narrow perceptions of gendered and racial roles in modern and contemporary society. Allegorically questioning the paradox of polarity, King’s works are imbued with overt and covert visual signifiers that illuminate the value of the previously unseen, unrecorded, and hidden. His tableaux seek to disrupt fixed norms through a surreal, dreamlike art of subversion.” continue to blog
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.” continue to blog
Clifford Prince King’s “The Backyard” (2019) is reproduced from Love Songs: Photography and Intimacy, the International Center of Photography’s new survey featuring work by fifteen established and emerging photographers including Nobuyoshi Araki, Nan Goldin, Leigh Ledare, Collier Schorr and King, among others. “Clifford Prince King’s documentary-style color photographs are anchored in the artist’s celebration of queer Black love and bear witness to changing and divided societies,” Sara Raza writes. “In the context of US history, King’s photographs highlight wider social topics concerning the struggle for Black liberation and public space and time. Challenging the spaces that were long dominated by colonial male heterosexual desires and influences, King subverts narrow perceptions of gendered and racial roles in modern and contemporary society. Allegorically questioning the paradox of polarity, King’s works are imbued with overt and covert visual signifiers that illuminate the value of the previously unseen, unrecorded, and hidden. His tableaux seek to disrupt fixed norms through a surreal, dreamlike art of subversion.” continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 7.5 x 10.75 in. / 208 pgs / 64 color / 130 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $49.95 LIST PRICE: CANADA $71.95 GBP £43.99 ISBN: 9781636811178 PUBLISHER: International Center of Photography/D.A.P. AVAILABLE: 7/4/2023 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: WORLD Except France
Published by International Center of Photography/D.A.P.. Foreword by David Little. Text by Simon Baker, Sara Raza. Contributions by Frédérique Dolivet, Pascal Höel, Laurie Hurwitz, Clothilde Morette.
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.
