until Sunday August 21 2022
Maison Européenne de la Photographie
T : +33 (0)1 44 78 75 00
5/7, rue de Fourcy
75004 Paris
France
Today, as in the past, photographers are making works of their intimacy.
Bringing together 14 series by the greatest photographers of the 20th and 21st centuries, the exhibition Love Songs. Photographies de l'intime brings together masterpieces from the MEP's collection and loans from major contemporary artists, some of which are being shown for the first time in Europe.
At the heart of the exhibition, the ensembles of Nobuyoshi Araki and Nan Goldin constitute the starting point of this new reading. The work of the two photographers is confronted with series by other major authors such as René Groebli, Emmet Gowin, Larry Clark, Sally Mann, Leigh Ledare, Hervé Guibert and Alix Cléo Roubaud, as well as by contemporary artists such as JH Engström & Margot Wallard, RongRong&inri, Lin Zhipeng (aka No 223), Hideka Tonomura and Collier Schorr.
Inspired by Nan Goldin's "The Ballad of Sexual Dependency" (1986), Love Songs is conceived as a musical compilation to be given to a lover. The first part of the exhibition - side A - consists of series from the 1950s to the 1990s. The second part - side B - presents images from the 1980s to the present.
Throughout the exhibition, the images invite us to discover a multitude of intimate stories and a diversity of love patterns. The first days of a relationship, marriage and honeymoon, small domestic joys but also the pain of separation or the last days shared with the loved one... the intimacy captured by the lens is revealed here in all its poetry and frankness.
Love Songs is above all a reflection on the very essence of photography. While the camera is often associated with a quest for objectivity, it has always been used to capture that which is subjective and beyond consensus. We cannot agree on what love is or what it should look like, how it transforms us or makes us see the world. Yet it is the subject of some of the most important and moving photographic work of the last century.
