Text by Bethany McKenzie

In a special issue of Critical Inquiry, the late literary scholar and cultural theorist Lauren Berlant wrote that ‘to intimate is to communicate with the sparest of signs and gestures’. In the most minor of interactions and objects of mundanity, profound aspects of human relationships are revealed to us in ways that are often too difficult to explain. This metamorphic quality, shifting lived experience into collective narrative, makes intimacy a powerful tool in the building of cultural worlds and begs the question of which spaces and relationships can be intimated in order to expand our notion of social norms.

Photography is a medium that has often been harnessed for its ability to transform the private into the public in ways that prove destabilising. To photograph intimacy is to disturb the cultural distinction that exists between the private life of the individual and the public narrative of the collective. It can therefore bring to our attention relations and identities that are usually relegated to the background.

How one harnesses the radical potential of intimacy however is a different conundrum, one that Nan Goldin has explored for decades. A dedicated archivist of intimacy, Goldin has captured many a tender portrait of her friends and loved ones, relishing in the hazed-filled bohemian hedonism of 1980s New York nightlife. In the underground subcultures of the city’s LGBT scene she discovered her distinctively candid style, an approach that felt thoroughly rooted in the personal. In a new exhibition at the Gagosian titled ‘You never did anything wrong’, the veteran photographer posits an interesting historical throughline by juxtaposing her archival photography against works by Renaissance and Baroque masters. As such, Goldin questions the hierarchy that designates ‘high art’. Thrust side by side in such a stark manner, the distinction between people’s everyday intimacies and the so-called masterpieces we lionise suddenly seems fatuous.

Far from the sanctified walls of the museum, the Argentinian-born photographer Marina Mónaco presents her documentary work in the diaristic book ‘I saw you in a song’ alongside personal letters and mixtapes that inform her work. Based in Berlin, her aesthetics are more concurrent with the seedy, post-punk photography of the Neue Deutsche Welle (New German Wave) than that of the 2020s.

Mónaco finds a connection to her subjects through photography where language, since she is not a native German speaker, fails her. Although the emotional attachment between her subjects - long-term muse and musician Nils Kepper and his equally tattooed scene partner Caro Ida - is evident in their physical closeness, the staging of intimacy also involves the photographer in this exchange. Nils and Caro often make direct eye contact with Mónaco’s lens, consenting to her witnessing - and indeed documenting - a moment that would usually be kept from view. As voyeur, we too become entangled in this process, producing a collective experience from a private moment between two individuals.

But what is communicated in this exchange remains unclear. As Berlant so brilliantly illustrated, intimacy is characterised by its subtlety, its clandestine gestures, yet it has no language to speak. It can be felt and understood in a myriad of ways: from the sound of someone’s laugh, the sight of their shoes in the hall, the other side of the bed that you share. Words come close but they never quite reach the same meaning as these signs.

In his delicate examination of love and intimacy ‘A Lover’s Discourse (1977) Roland Barthes wrestled with this struggle of something so deeply felt being ineffable, only grasped through fragments of the whole. Thy Tran’s 2017 photobook Cacher takes it lead from Barthes. This body of work was produced as a way for the photographer to process her struggle to come to terms with her homosexuality - cacher meaning the French for ‘to hide’ - and the resultant difficulty she faced in proclaiming her feelings towards her partner. Obscuring her and her lover’s faces, she displaces the intimacy of their emotional connection onto the physical, the bodily and the mundane. The effect sees “I love yous” become everyday objects and isolated body parts, half-lidded gazes and empty rooms. We see Tran’s partner as she does, through signs. As an individualised portrait of her relationship, her work delicately exposes the universality of our collective inability to verbalise what is felt so strongly, expunging the myth of sexual hierarchy that banishes non-heterosexual relationships to the private realm.

Even fictional relationships can provoke a collective social reckoning. Carrie Mae Weems’ famous Kitchen Table Series photographed a drama in which she stages various relationships from the life of one woman - portrayed by herself - all from the intimate setting of her kitchen. Although her lover eventually leaves her wanting, Weems’ gaze is warm and loving. It feels familiar. The series is not about Blackness per say; too often we see minority artists have their work placed in a box that limits their creative expression to race rather than the entire spectrum of human experience that is extended to their white counterparts. But to see such a caring and gentle depiction of intimacy within a Black relationship, fictional or otherwise, was groundbreaking in the context of the 1990s which clung to ‘Sapphire’ stereotyping of the overbearing, sexually manipulative Black woman. By intimating this aspect of the Black experience with such warmth and attention, Weems highlighted its universalisms whilst unmasking what society purposely conceals in order to naturalise difference.

In Greta Gerwig’s 2017 feature Lady Bird, there is a scene in which the titular character, portrayed wonderfully by Saorsie Ronan, receives feedback on a college essay discussing her hometown of Sacramento, California. Referring to the essay, the principal of her Catholic girl’s high school Sister Sarah Joan (Lois Smith) comments that Lady Bird clearly loves Sacramento very dearly at which Lady Bird protests.

“I guess I pay attention” she states plainly.

“Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing - love and attention?” Sister Sarah Joan replies.

The notion that love and attention are one in the same is a touching sentiment and perhaps provides the simple yet revolutionary basis for photographing intimacy. When photographers turn their lenses onto their loved ones - partners, friends, family, homes, possessions - they are giving them a level of attention usually reserved for that which we consider worthy of such deification. Photography of the intimate ranges from the most revered artists to that of the amateur. To turn our attention inward is to become the director and curator of our own private lives and in doing so we allow others a glimpse into what normally remains hidden. To give attention to these things, these people, no matter how mundane they may appear on the surface, is akin to an expression of love in itself. In a world where we are encouraged to fine tune our public persona, to perfect our image from behind the safety of a screen, photography of the intimate reaffirms the true power of the camera - to remind us of our collective humanness.

Text by Bethany McKenzie

Published 24th October 2024.

glimpse magazine