If you are heading off to France to celebrate President Macron’s re-election, then Queerguru’s Paris Correspondent Richard Gilles says to be sure to also check out Love Songs at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie.

Taking Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1986) as its starting point, Love Songs,  this new, poetically-charged exhibition is structured like a musical compilation devoted to a lover: ‘Side A’ comprises photographs dating 1950–1990, and ‘Side B’ 2000–today. While Nobuyoshi Araki’s Sentimental Journey (1971) and Goldin’s Ballad – two bodies of work that marked watershed moments in the history of photography – form key presentations, the exhibition prevails for its highly-intuitive curation, with greats such as Emmet Gowin, Larry Clark and Sally Mann in company with contemporary image-makers like Leigh Ledare, Hideka Tonomura, Motoyuki Daifu, Collier Schorr and Karla Hiraldo Voleau. Together, they tell a history of photography through the lens of love. Love Songs presents a history of photography through the prism of intimacy. Bringing together series by some of the most important photographers of the 20th and 21st centuries, it shows both the importance of this idea to artists working now, as well as its rich history. 

Love Songs is a proposition about the nature of photography: the fact that, although the camera is often believed to be ‘objective’, it has frequently been used to record something about which we can find almost no agreement, objectively speaking; something entirely subjective. We may not agree on what love is, or how it is supposed to look, how it makes us look or how it makes us see, and yet it has been the subject of some of the most significant and powerful photographic work of the past century. 

Love Songs runs at MEP, Paris until 21 August 2022.