For a moment, I could not just see it but hear it. I had come off the elevator at the International Center of Photography for a museum’s silence—and for “Love Songs.” As a long-ago hit begins, “somewhere there’s music,” and love is in the air.
Sheree Hovsepian is just one of sixteen photographers on the theme of love, through September 11 (and sorry for the late post), in a show that began at Maison Européenne in Paris. She carefully frames her collage of ceramic, velvet, and wood, befitting the care and caring of love. 
The wood’s smooth surfaces and curved edges that made me think of violins from a finer age in Italy or guitars as a craft today. Does Iiu Susiraja at MoMA PS1 treat photography as a discomforting love affair with herself, as if under too strong a light? Here only photography can break the silence—and I bring this together with my recent report on Susiraja as a longer review and my latest upload. As the song’s title goes, “How High the Moon.”
Well, maybe not that high. Hovsepian includes photos of a naked body with its head cut off, alluring but clinical—the whole wrapped tightly but delicately in yellow string. Is this bondage, a disturbing form of sexual desire, or the binding of her memories to keep them from slipping away? Could that be why the show runs to photocollage and work in series, like scrapbooks? ICP’s curator, Sara Raza, speaks of the show as a mix tape, and each photographer might have created one to share with a lover. Still, they keep asking, is that enough to keep their love alive?
Hovsepian’s physical collage is an exception, and so is actual sound to accompany three-channel video by Ergin Çavuşoğlu in Turkey. He proposes to track its site from the Ottoman court to a cement factory to its state today. Light ripples on a quiet river as traffic passes and people glide by. He could be remembering or learning when to forget. Aikaterini Gegisian almost gets physical, too, with sharp color as frame and background for her personal and found photos. She speaks of it as a record less of love than of a life passed in flea markets.
The need for a record can outlast love. Karla Hiraldo Voleau assembles photos of a relationship into a calendar, but without neat rows and columns for the days. In one shot she hides her eyes, just as she did from the evidence that her lover had betrayed her. Leigh Ledare wants a record so much that he asked his ex to photograph a return to their getaway in the woods with her new lover, for Double Bind. Display cases contain magazine clippings and more piled photos, wilting at the edges. He cannot let anything go.
Love, they agree, is beautiful but hard. Nobuyoshi Araki begins his Sentimental Journey on his honeymoon in 1971, where his wife lies asleep or sits up in bed with no trace of feeling. Sadly, too, before long he was on his Winter Journey with his wife dying young. She lies in a casket, not as an ending but amid moments of life. Dying returns with On War and Love by Fouad Elkoury in Beirut, where everyone is in exile amid Israeli and Lebanese bombs. Will they ever see each other, he keeps asking in text and photographs, or hold one another again?
Beauty is hard, too. Time and again a subject is hooded, masked or shrouded, like his male fiancé or friend for Hervé Guibert. He follows their travels across Europe in 1982, but without a storyline of lost or enduring love. Proud Flesh for Sally Mann, brutally exposed, bears the scars of muscular dystrophy. Yet it glows under the photographer’s raking light. Lin Zhipeng (going by the name No. 223) subjects his lover’s skin to close-ups, broken and bleeding, as a testimony to physical sensation and the senses.
For all that, they take their relationships seriously. RongRong&inri (a collective of two) views their bodies with a shared eye, as a shared art, with a shared fate. Clifford Prince King, the show’s sole African American, holds up a flower, although I cannot say to whom. Collier Schorr thinks of his work as a collaboration with Angel Zinovieff. “What,” he asks, “do you see when I look at you?” Maybe just home. She poses nude in the kitchen.
Motoyuki Daifu cherishes domesticity, with the single mother whom he met while she was pregnant and who has become his wife. The very first photos, from René Groebli in 1952, date from his honeymoon as well. Their Paris hotel, the very image of glamour and luxury, will have to do for home, with slippers by bed and underwear hung up to dry. After all these years, Nan Goldin still has the most powerful record of connections and desires. The Ballad of Sexual Dependency from 1973 to 1986, serves as a record, too, originally as a slide show. Now as photographs, their fragments of intimacy seem no longer sordid but simply fragile.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.