It’s Valentine’s Day. I’m not sure how that makes you feel. It’s just another capitalist holiday, no? But that doesn’t take away from the pertinence of what it celebrates: love. An umbrella term for something much larger; a gargantuan force that comes in many shapes and sizes, one that makes us do silly things. Cosmic, karmic, forbidden, manic, erotic, platonic, familial… 

Below, we‘ve gathered some of our favourite previously published photo projects from the Dazed archives examining romance, relationships, love and lust (and the flip side of this alluring coin; betrayal, rejection and heartbreak). Yushi Li explores love’s erotic facets, reimagining art history and mythological melodrama through the lens of female-coded fantasy; the creative and romantic partners Rona Bar and Ofek Avshalom look to spontaneous cohabitation, juxtaposing this with the comfort and safety that accumulates through customary companionship; and Marina Mónaco examines the fleeting potency of young love. Feast your eyes on all of these and more below. 

YUSHI LI, PAINTINGS, DREAMS AND LOVE

With her camera and a head for the erotic, Yushi Li reconceptualises scenes from art history and mythological melodrama, drawing inspiration from works including Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s “The Roses of Heliogabalus” (1888) and Henry Fuseli’s “The Nightmare” (1781). Informed by the psychoanalytical theories of Laura Mulvey and Lacan, themes of power, desire, fantasy and frustration run through Li’s oeuvre as she interrogates and defies age-old biases of hedonism and the portrayal of pleasure as we were once taught it. Where women have historically been the object of desire, Li toys with the very concept, warping monochromatic theories of gender and gaze to better reflect her own fantasies and dreams. 

Read the full story on Dazed here now. 

MARINA MÓNACO, KIDS

“Is there anything better than young love?” asks photographer Marina Mónaco. “This feeling just happens one or two times when you are young, super deeply, then it’ll go away and maybe you are too old or too mature to enjoy it anymore.” Love, or rather, young love is unique in its all-consuming but often transient nature. Inspired by this phenomenon, Mónaco photographed young lovers in Europe as part of her series titled Kids, in which she documented youth culture on film over three years. Her interest in the subject occurred in tandem with a toxic relationship of her own, which, she tells us, caused her to look at manifestations of love that surrounded her. Spontaneity and nostalgia were central for Mónaco, who immortalises the raw and random moments that play out between young people, fearful that these blips in time, if left undocumented, would otherwise slip away. “I can never avoid the thought ‘this is something that will never happen again’ every time I look at a photograph,” she says. “I’m obsessed with feeling nostalgic for lives I never lived.” 

Read the full story on Dazed here now. 

SAM PENN, BAD BEHAVIOUR

Romantic, congenial, disappointing, brutal. It’s this all too familiar cycle of romance, hedonism and heartbreak that New York-based photographer Sam Penn chronicles. The project is named after Mary Gaitskill’s collection of short stories, Bad Behaviour (1988), which Penn read and related to during the rocky interim between relationships. “I found the characters in Bad Behaviour entangled in each other’s suffering, dealing with heartbreak, addiction and disappointment; what happens when a relationship doesn’t live up to expectation or fantasy,” she previously told Dazed. “The stories felt like a reflection of my own life, and the work I was trying to make out of it.” 

The accompanying zine is published by New York Gallery Life and is available here now. Read the full story on Dazed here now. 

TEE A. CORRINE, A FOREST FIRE BETWEEN US 

Photographer, lesbian, sex activist, educator and author Tee A. Corrine ignites the flames in our loins with her recent photo book, A forest fire between us (published by MACK). Deep diving into her expansive archive, collating unseen shots, slides, contact sheets and ephemera of tender and touching lesbian intimacies, A forest fire between us explores desire. After she first came out, photography aided Corrine in making sense of sex and sexuality. The anthology of her explorations, displayed in this book, now offers us insight into her impact as a radical photographer who channelled activism, community and image-making to discuss desire and dismantle stigma. 

Published by MACK and available here. 

MEGAN WALLACE, LABOUR OF LOVE 

“I’m personally quite obsessed with creative-artist couples,” says Megan Wallace, the curator of Labour of Love, an exhibition which focused on the interplay of romance and art with a focus on London-based queer creative couples. In the collection’s curation, Wallace sought out visual manifestations of the rules, rituals and motifs that accumulate in relationships, created through shared artistic practices and collaborations between creative partners. “It can be a safe space to unpack [sexual] trauma, explore gender and create new relationship structures away from the cis-heteronormative, monogamous models of love and intimacy that we have been taught from a young age,” she says. Featuring work by Nora Nord, Jesse Glazzard, Hannah Parsons, Beliza Buzollo, Rachel Ellen Hopkins, Xoey Fourr, Hidhir Badaruddin, Simone Casarotti, and a DJ set by Loraine James, the exhibition took place at east London’s VFD, a community-led music and arts venue for queer cultural endeavours, in 2022.   

Read the full story on Dazed here now. 

RONA BAR AND OFEK AVSHALOM, US 

Photographers Rona Bar and Ofek Avshalom – who are both creative and romantic partners – record the intimacy between couples in their homes, unclothed and unguarded. Their photo series Us was born in the height of the pandemic, inspired by an urge to share stories of love and communion amid the uncertainty and isolation of the unprecedented plague. Starting with couples who were locking down together, Bar and Avshalom wanted to document the spontaneity of these unions. Shot across two years, the series is not bound to the pandemic but rather to the timelessness of comfort and safety found through love and intimacy.  

Read the full story on Dazed here now. 

MARY KATHERINE TRAMONTANA, SERIOUS PLEASURES

In her debut art book, Serious Pleasures – a publication of portraits accompanied by Annie Ernaux-esque erotic poetry, artist Mary Katharine Tramontana explores desire, grief and the taboo of age-gap sex. Through the pocket-sized pages of Serious Pleasures, Tramontana undertakes a raw exploration of the crude and yet fundamentally human nature of pleasure and sexual gratification, documenting an incapacitating on-again, off-again romance and encounters with other people. Marked by the end of a 10-year open relationship with her partner as well as the death of a former partner, the artist found that pleasure and desire helped subside the pain.

Tramontana turned on her creativity (and herself) to help mourn and process this sudden period of intense grief. “Desiring and feeling desired again lifted me out of my despair. It woke up parts of me that had lain dormant and showed me new parts of myself too. Through that, I decided to make a body of work that was purely about turning myself on,” she told Dazed earlier this year. While it’s not an explicit “catalogue” of her desires, Tramontana, who recently turned 43, admits to experiencing satisfaction from the mutual desire between herself and her younger male subjects. She notes that the concept of an older childless woman and a younger man engaging in sexual activity is taboo in its admission that women, too, might just fuck for pleasure.  

Read the full story on Dazed here now. 

LOVE SONGS: PHOTOGRAPHY AND INTIMACY 

Loving comes loaded with the risk of loss. It’s this – love’s fragility and the possibility for heart-puncturing pain – that informed much of Love Songs: Photography and Intimacy, an exhibition curated by Simon Barker and hosted at Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris in 2022. The collection, featuring emotive stills including “Brian in Bed and One Month After Being Battered” by Nan Goldin, Sally Mann’s depiction of her husband Larry’s deterioration from muscular dystrophy, Nobuyoshi Araki’s photos of his wife and muse Yoko from their honeymoon up to her death, among others by René Groebli, Emmet Gowin and Hervé Guibert, ultimately depicts the ebbs and flows of life in love.

Read the full story on Dazed here now. 

KARLA HIRALDO VOLEAU, ANOTHER LOVE STORY

In her photo book Another Love Story, photographer Karla Hiraldo Voleau addresses love’s underbelly: the cavernous and cruel treachery of infidelity; the peril that comes with putting your heart into the hands of another. Published by Mörel after an initial premiere at the MEP Studio in Paris, the photo book tells the story of Hiraldo Voleau’s relationship with her ex-boyfriend through a series of images of their most intimate moments. Only, it’s not actually her ex. Rather, she involves a paid actor with whom she reenacts her relationship. The project began as an ode to love, though it soon evolved into a deeper shade of darkness after she discovered his affair. “The blurring of reality and fiction in this project mimics what I lived through,” she told Dazed. “It’s quite a literal transcription of my feelings and of a relationship where you don’t have any idea who is in the pictures. It becomes almost nauseating that this happy loving man looking at me with tender eyes and smiling is putting on a façade.”

Another Love Story is available to order here. Read the full story on Dazed here now. 

ADRIÁN ALARCÓN SÁNCHEZ, LOVE

Frustrated by the wearied tropes of love, photographer Adrián Alarcón Sánchez redefines the sentiment through his photo zine LOVE. While the project began as a testimony of his own hookups, it evolved into an abundant collection of photos featuring those around him. His photos are stolen moments; candid flashes of as many as 40 lovers – mostly friends and family – on the cusp of a kiss or in a tender embrace. Neither posed nor staged, Sánchez counters hegemony, heteronormativity and convention through his imagery. One of Sánchez’s subjects is his close friend Elin McCready, a professor of English at Aoyama Gakuin University in Tokyo, who he first met in a German class. In a letter that opens the zine, McCready writes: “A lot of us were told we would never know love... some of us believed it, internalised it, weaponised it against ourselves. But it was a lie, or at best a mistake. If proof was needed, it is here in these photos.”

Read the full story on Dazed here now.