June 5, 2023

Love Songs: Photography and Intimacy at International Center of Photography (ICP), June 2 – September 11, 2023

“The International Center of Photography (ICP) explores love and desire through intimate images taken by lovers in a group exhibition this summer. On view from June 2 through September 11, 2023, Love Songs: Photography and Intimacy features over 250 works throughout ICP’s galleries, presenting photographic projects that read as personal stories by 16 international artists, including Nobuyoshi Araki, Ergin Çavuşoğlu, Motoyuki Daifu, Fouad Elkoury, Aikaterini Gegisian, Nan Goldin, René Groebli, Hervé Guibert, Sheree Hovsepian, Clifford Prince King, Leigh Ledare, Lin Zhipeng (No. 223), Sally Mann, RongRong&inri, Collier Schorr, and Karla Hiraldo Voleau. 

Revealing private and powerful intimate relationships, Love Songs includes series dating from 1952 to 2022 by some of the leading and emerging photographers of our time that express complex, elusive, and contradictory entanglements. Taking us through personal, often unseen stories between 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 between loves—the intimacies depicted by these artists are rarely seen in the history of photography and offer images of love that range from poetic, to romantic, to raw.” — ICP

Nobuyoshi Araki, Sentimental Journey, 1971. Collection MEP, Paris. Gift from Dai Nippon Printing Co., Ltd. © Nobuyoshi Araki, Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery
Aikaterini Gegisian, Handbook of the Spontaneous Other (Blue 4), 2019 © Aikaterini Gegisian
René Groebli, from The Eye of Love, 1952. Collection MEP, Paris. © René Groebli, courtesy Galerie Esther Woerdehoff
Hervé Guibert, Sienne, 1979. Collection MEP, Paris. © Christine Guibert, courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris
Rong Rong&inri, from Personal Letters, 2000. Hand-annotated gelatin silver print. © RongRong&inri

“I’ve recut and reordered the original visual playlist of the Love Songs exhibition to include bodies of work by artists whose subversive photographic and filmic practices rely on the montage technique of interweaving art and ideas of our time,” said curator Sara Raza. “These works offer a window into the themes of aftermath, contradiction, collision, desire, distortion, and reality.” 

The exhibition is organized in collaboration with the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), Paris, based upon an original idea by Simon Baker, and was curated at MEP by Frédérique Dolivet and Pascal Hoël. The exhibition includes 118 works on loan from the MEP’s collection. The New York presentation of Love Songs is organized by curator and writer Sara Raza, who remixed the show to feature new work.

Title image: Collier Schorr, Angel Zinovieff (Posing not hiding), 2022. © Collier Schorr, Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York

Images courtesy International Center of Photography.