Love Songs: Photography and Intimacy

How photographers from Nan Goldin to Leigh Ledare have portrayed intimacy and eros between themselves and their subjects

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.