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.”