最もロマンチックな写真集6冊

Living with a photographer can’t be easy. You must feel like you are always being watched, to be caught unawares at any given moment, your true self on full view. It is only later that you realise that it wasn’t your essence that the photographer has captured, but theirs; that each photograph is really a reflection back onto their own emotional lives. So, with that said, are all photographs just a kind of extended visual autobiography? How much does our conception of the world hinge on – or shape – how we love? Does our love illuminate reality or blind us from it? And do we make photographs that complement our worldview or tear it apart?

In celebration of the February blessing that is Valentine’s Day, we have cherry-picked some of the most beautiful, compelling and heart-racing-slash-breaking books which deepen these mysteries. Diving into the heart of desire, intimacy and autofiction, they traverse first love to lost love, taking as common threads the most private and intimate aspects of their authors’ lives. All will linger like a lover’s perfume.

Another Love Story by Karla Hiraldo Voleau (lead image)

Ever been changed by someone? One for the broken-hearted is Karla Hiraldo Voleau’s plot-twisty page-turner. It restages the story of the artist’s relationship with her ex-boyfriend, which starts at the end, dishing out an emotional karate chop upon the implication that her lover was leading an adulterous, double life. What follows is a reappropriated mix of real camera roll imagery, recreations through the use of a hired actor, text messages and handwritten notes which map out the complicated “making” – and subsequent performance – of their relationship, while speaking to romantic cliches such as #couplegoals, not to mention photography’s complicity with the unreliable. Indeed, sometimes the greatest insights into love can come from reflections on the ways it can go wrong, and Hiraldo Voleau here offers a warning on how desire can skew the way we see things, and, most painfully of all, how the people we once loved can become strangers again. Reminding us that it is when we are at our most vulnerable that we are the most honest, the artist has wrested back control of her own (hi)story, turning trauma into catharsis. A bold and blazing book, both aching and affirming.

Lovesody by Motoyuki Daifu

Young love is captured in all its bittersweetness in Motoyuki Daifu’s debut book from 2012. It documents the daily life of a young pregnant, single mother with whom Daifu fell head over heels for when he met her in a cell phone store in Tokyo. Following his heart, he moved in with his crush and her child, making photographs which not only show the many tender nuances of womanhood, motherhood and coupledom, but reflect Daifu’s simultaneous roles as lover, father and even child. As always for Daifu, there’s a love for environment, with his unconventional camerawork showcasing interior stuff in such a way that reveals the Japanese private sphere as one in which chaos reigns over order. This story lasted six months, a fleeting romance that nevertheless has turned eternal since its publication, which is handled with sincerity as well as a certain emotional distance. It evokes innocence, uncertainty and the sacrifices true love entails. Palpable here is the melancholic chord, the agonising beauty of a relationship that wasn’t quite meant to be. Daifu, however, does not lament the “what if” conundrum with a sigh, but dials it up to a soulful serenade of might-have-beens and almost-weres. Of course, Daifu wouldn’t have it any other way.

Kelli Connell’s long-in-the-making book serves as a love letter to Charis Wilson, the writer and wife of modernist photography pioneer Edward Weston, whose pictures and nudes she appeared in between 1934-45. Across four sections, it chronicles Connell’s pilgrimage to the locales the couple visited during their cross-country trips, inserting Betsy, her partner at the time, into the landscapes. Connell’s half-ghosted photographs combine reverie and reality, veneration and humility, and brim with visual rifts and rhymes alongside archival imagery and prose by Charis. One gets the sense of stepping into Charis’ shoes, imagining what these sand dunes might have looked like or, indeed, what Weston’s gaze might have felt like. The pink cloth spine and pages are delicate but disruptive details, sharpening the queer and feminist lens Connell continues to work through. What she offers here is a canon-revising intervention into the ongoing history of photography, while smartly shaking up traditional notions of selfhood, the muse and relationships in general. Burning a hole on the first page is a quote by Roland Barthes, who connects the Greek meaning of charis to a not-so-distant memory that “the loved object will bestow itself upon my desire”. That Charis clearly did.

Named after the catchy 1958 song by The Edsels, Yusuke Yamatani’s Rama Lama Ding Dong is one of those soul-swelling instances in which a photo book not only tells a story, but takes us on a journey. It is a journey through Japan, from the hot springs of the north to the volcanoes of the south, constituting the honeymoon holiday the photographer shared with his wife Emi in the summer of 2014. The revelatory tenor of Noboyushi Araki’s own honeymoon chronicle – a classic contribution to the popular Japanese post-war “I-novel” genre – is strong, with Yamatani lensing his love with startling closeness, sincerity and zeal. “I wanted to show my wife everything I have seen in my life, first,” said the photographer, who blends luminous scenes from the open road with snapshots of butterflies clustered on the window, mosquito bites and soft, lingering half-views of Emi. This book reveals Yamatani’s philosophy as photography-as-life, as about living through the camera and inside the frame. You feel that, for him, snapping a camera is as natural as breathing the air or having a pulse. It is the pulse of a budding love, the greatest cause for celebration.

On the other hand, this Masahisa Fukase title shows us that marriage can occasion just as much adventure at home as on the road. The Japanese photographer’s obsessed, extreme and ultimately self-destructive relationship with Yoko is one of the most famous – and indeed most devastating – love stories in all of photography, and Wonderful Days, produced posthumously in 2015, takes us back to 1964, when the newly-wedded pair moved into their apartment in Sōka. Throughout these pages, their four walls transform into a theatre of love, where acts of affection and play are performed in collaboration with their Siamese cat Kabo and black stray Hebo (the book’s afterword explains how the former was more attached to Yoko, while the latter would fetch kamaboko fish cakes for Fukase). Few photographers have worn their heart on their sleeve with such conviction as Fukase, who, above all, reminded us that the line between art and obsession is very fine indeed. The book winds up with a powerful nostalgic sentiment, evoking the same feelings you get from seeing the credits of a beautiful movie you wished never ended. This one is all the more tear-jerking if you know how the rest of the story goes.

Another book based on a relationship that has gone down in the history of photography, The Banquet stands as one of the most romantic photographic odes to love of all time. It collects pictures of the meals Nobuyoshi Araki shared with his wife Yoko during the final month or so of her life, after she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. The saturated and sensuous macro shots made with the aid of a ring flash move through flavours sweet, savoury and sour, but more often than not teeter towards the abstract and symbolic, resembling bodily organs or indeed cancerous terrains. Araki appears to take us full circle, not only reimagining these “last suppers” as ones he might have shared with Yoko on their first dates, but pondering on universal truths about the course of life and death – culminating in a kind of letting go. The book’s final act takes a morbid turn, transitioning to black-and-white in such a way that anticipates love’s shadow-twin: death. Yet, by way of the very gesture and ritual of photography, Araki’s volume not only serves as a heart-stopping tribute to his wife, but to love triumphing over loss. A forever muse.

Living with a photographer can’t be easy. You must feel like you are always being watched, to be caught unawares at any given moment, your true self on full view. It is only later that you realise that it wasn’t your essence that the photographer has captured, but theirs; that each photograph is really a reflection back onto their own emotional lives. So, with that said, are all photographs just a kind of extended visual autobiography? How much does our conception of the world hinge on – or shape – how we love? Does our love illuminate reality or blind us from it? And do we make photographs that complement our worldview or tear it apart?

In celebration of the February blessing that is Valentine’s Day, we have cherry-picked some of the most beautiful, compelling and heart-racing-slash-breaking books which deepen these mysteries. Diving into the heart of desire, intimacy and autofiction, they traverse first love to lost love, taking as common threads the most private and intimate aspects of their authors’ lives. All will linger like a lover’s perfume.

Another Love Story by Karla Hiraldo Voleau (lead image)

Ever been changed by someone? One for the broken-hearted is Karla Hiraldo Voleau’s plot-twisty page-turner. It restages the story of the artist’s relationship with her ex-boyfriend, which starts at the end, dishing out an emotional karate chop upon the implication that her lover was leading an adulterous, double life. What follows is a reappropriated mix of real camera roll imagery, recreations through the use of a hired actor, text messages and handwritten notes which map out the complicated “making” – and subsequent performance – of their relationship, while speaking to romantic cliches such as #couplegoals, not to mention photography’s complicity with the unreliable. Indeed, sometimes the greatest insights into love can come from reflections on the ways it can go wrong, and Hiraldo Voleau here offers a warning on how desire can skew the way we see things, and, most painfully of all, how the people we once loved can become strangers again. Reminding us that it is when we are at our most vulnerable that we are the most honest, the artist has wrested back control of her own (hi)story, turning trauma into catharsis. A bold and blazing book, both aching and affirming.

Lovesody by Motoyuki Daifu

Young love is captured in all its bittersweetness in Motoyuki Daifu’s debut book from 2012. It documents the daily life of a young pregnant, single mother with whom Daifu fell head over heels for when he met her in a cell phone store in Tokyo. Following his heart, he moved in with his crush and her child, making photographs which not only show the many tender nuances of womanhood, motherhood and coupledom, but reflect Daifu’s simultaneous roles as lover, father and even child. As always for Daifu, there’s a love for environment, with his unconventional camerawork showcasing interior stuff in such a way that reveals the Japanese private sphere as one in which chaos reigns over order. This story lasted six months, a fleeting romance that nevertheless has turned eternal since its publication, which is handled with sincerity as well as a certain emotional distance. It evokes innocence, uncertainty and the sacrifices true love entails. Palpable here is the melancholic chord, the agonising beauty of a relationship that wasn’t quite meant to be. Daifu, however, does not lament the “what if” conundrum with a sigh, but dials it up to a soulful serenade of might-have-beens and almost-weres. Of course, Daifu wouldn’t have it any other way.

Kelli Connell’s long-in-the-making book serves as a love letter to Charis Wilson, the writer and wife of modernist photography pioneer Edward Weston, whose pictures and nudes she appeared in between 1934-45. Across four sections, it chronicles Connell’s pilgrimage to the locales the couple visited during their cross-country trips, inserting Betsy, her partner at the time, into the landscapes. Connell’s half-ghosted photographs combine reverie and reality, veneration and humility, and brim with visual rifts and rhymes alongside archival imagery and prose by Charis. One gets the sense of stepping into Charis’ shoes, imagining what these sand dunes might have looked like or, indeed, what Weston’s gaze might have felt like. The pink cloth spine and pages are delicate but disruptive details, sharpening the queer and feminist lens Connell continues to work through. What she offers here is a canon-revising intervention into the ongoing history of photography, while smartly shaking up traditional notions of selfhood, the muse and relationships in general. Burning a hole on the first page is a quote by Roland Barthes, who connects the Greek meaning of charis to a not-so-distant memory that “the loved object will bestow itself upon my desire”. That Charis clearly did.

Named after the catchy 1958 song by The Edsels, Yusuke Yamatani’s Rama Lama Ding Dong is one of those soul-swelling instances in which a photo book not only tells a story, but takes us on a journey. It is a journey through Japan, from the hot springs of the north to the volcanoes of the south, constituting the honeymoon holiday the photographer shared with his wife Emi in the summer of 2014. The revelatory tenor of Noboyushi Araki’s own honeymoon chronicle – a classic contribution to the popular Japanese post-war “I-novel” genre – is strong, with Yamatani lensing his love with startling closeness, sincerity and zeal. “I wanted to show my wife everything I have seen in my life, first,” said the photographer, who blends luminous scenes from the open road with snapshots of butterflies clustered on the window, mosquito bites and soft, lingering half-views of Emi. This book reveals Yamatani’s philosophy as photography-as-life, as about living through the camera and inside the frame. You feel that, for him, snapping a camera is as natural as breathing the air or having a pulse. It is the pulse of a budding love, the greatest cause for celebration.

On the other hand, this Masahisa Fukase title shows us that marriage can occasion just as much adventure at home as on the road. The Japanese photographer’s obsessed, extreme and ultimately self-destructive relationship with Yoko is one of the most famous – and indeed most devastating – love stories in all of photography, and Wonderful Days, produced posthumously in 2015, takes us back to 1964, when the newly-wedded pair moved into their apartment in Sōka. Throughout these pages, their four walls transform into a theatre of love, where acts of affection and play are performed in collaboration with their Siamese cat Kabo and black stray Hebo (the book’s afterword explains how the former was more attached to Yoko, while the latter would fetch kamaboko fish cakes for Fukase). Few photographers have worn their heart on their sleeve with such conviction as Fukase, who, above all, reminded us that the line between art and obsession is very fine indeed. The book winds up with a powerful nostalgic sentiment, evoking the same feelings you get from seeing the credits of a beautiful movie you wished never ended. This one is all the more tear-jerking if you know how the rest of the story goes.

Another book based on a relationship that has gone down in the history of photography, The Banquet stands as one of the most romantic photographic odes to love of all time. It collects pictures of the meals Nobuyoshi Araki shared with his wife Yoko during the final month or so of her life, after she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. The saturated and sensuous macro shots made with the aid of a ring flash move through flavours sweet, savoury and sour, but more often than not teeter towards the abstract and symbolic, resembling bodily organs or indeed cancerous terrains. Araki appears to take us full circle, not only reimagining these “last suppers” as ones he might have shared with Yoko on their first dates, but pondering on universal truths about the course of life and death – culminating in a kind of letting go. The book’s final act takes a morbid turn, transitioning to black-and-white in such a way that anticipates love’s shadow-twin: death. Yet, by way of the very gesture and ritual of photography, Araki’s volume not only serves as a heart-stopping tribute to his wife, but to love triumphing over loss. A forever muse.