In 1966 Claude Lelouch made a film about a widow and a widower who keep meeting at their children's boarding school in Deauville. Almost nothing happens. They drive, they hesitate, they have dinner. A Man and a Woman took the Palme d'Or and two Oscars, and sixty years on it is hard to name a recent film — or photograph, or painting — that takes mutual desire that seriously.
I keep testing this against the exhibitions I walk through. Photography now speaks fluently about the body, about identity, about trauma and care, and it should. But desire between two people — desire as a force that builds something rather than wounds someone — has almost no current pictures. When intimacy reaches a gallery wall it usually arrives already broken, framed as evidence. Passion, where it survives at all, is shown as conflict.
Popular psychology has done its part. We have learned to call wanting someone 'attachment', to treat needing another person as a deficiency to work on, to hold self-sufficiency up as the finished state. Meanwhile the Harvard Study of Adult Development, after following real lives for the better part of a century, keeps arriving at the same unfashionable result: what keeps people happy and well is not money or fame but warm, close relationships with particular other people. The research says one thing. The imagery says another.
There is one room in London where I still see desire treated with respect. The lights go down at a milonga, and for the length of three songs two people, often strangers, agree to hold each other in silence. Nobody apologises for it. Dancers in their seventies do it beside dancers in their twenties; two women do it; a man in a bow tie waits out the pause before the music decides for him. I dance there myself, and I photograph it, and the faces I bring home look like nothing else in my archive: concentrated, unguarded, serious about another person.
So this journal opens with a list I have been keeping — pictures of love that used to exist and have gone missing. Desire without display. Tenderness that nobody is diagnosing. I intend to go looking for them with a camera, in the milongas and outside them, and to write down what I find. If you know where the missing pictures are, write to me.
Irene Ardan
Letters from the studio
If this note stayed with you, there are more — essays and stories behind the shoots, sent as full letters.