“I feel like a kid again” Photography and Installation project:
Using a digital camera and a 35 mm black and white film camera, I took pictures of couples all around Providence ages 18-24 (with one couple based in New York). I asked them to be intimate with each other in public or private spaces that felt familiar to them, and had them try to imagine I wasn’t there. I had never been an objective witness of love before, and it was truly mesmerizing. Each couple directed me to a new place in Providence that they felt connected to, whether it was a first date, or a fond memory where locality was central to that time in their relationship. Following the photoshoot I interviewed the couples and asked them to tell me about their experience before entering the relationship, how it changed them, and how they work through being in a partnership. I compiled these words into quotes and created an installation combining the quotes on paper, with the photographs in frames, surrounded by little objects, forming my own little ‘mantle of love, that isn’t mine’.
The experience of photographing these couples was an intensely personal project. It allowed me to explore my own relationship to love and solitude. Media of all forms tends to paint a picture of love as a dream-like fairy tale in which two people meet in a unique and romantic way and instantly fall in love. Yet, with this project, I got to see behind the curtain and be the single objective watcher of what ‘love’ and relationships really are, without the dramatization. I’ve only ever been able to perceive my own relationships that I was an active participant in, but this allowed me to become an outsider looking in on a removed experience. In deeply personal ways, this project reminded me of what it feels like to “be a kid again”, sharing the simplest moments in life with someone else. And how the stories aren’t all fairytales. How love and relationships aren’t picturesque movies, they are exactly what they are; complicated, beautiful, and real. Every couple said they never expected to be in a relationship.
May, early Spring Time, chlorine and letters, red solo cups, scooters and rain, paint swatches and ukuleles, jewelry and vanilla pudding, post it notes and gold scissors, carbonara, tenderness, and moths.
“How did things work out the way they did? So much had to line up. I think about fate a lot”