A photographic look at love from the past put in our present.
Direction by Danielle Momoh
Co-direction by Bee Roldan & Alexis Puthussery
Photographed by Bee Roldan
Concept by Danielle Momoh & Alexis Puthussery
In the past, many have sought to explore love with their painter's brush, their inky pens, their violin bows. And every time, love is persuaded to lie still for a few moments and be woven into someone’s medium. But now, when capturing a memory can be as easy as tapping on a phone screen, is the way of capturing love different? Is love fundamentally different? Modern Love doesn't pretend to have the answers. It turns the pondering over to you. Can the love found in paintings made centuries before any of us were realized just as easily be found today? And if it is found, has it shifted to suit our modern landscape? What we do know is, classic paintings and college house parties have at least one thing in common: Love.
La danse à Bougival (1883) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir
“This, too, is romance. The unclean face kissed clean and made ready for the night.“
-Hanif Abdurraqib
Venus au Mirior (1555) by Titian
"Love is everything everywhere all at once... but it's also a specific detail about a specific moment regarding a specific thing frozen in a specific point in time & modern love is the water cycle & birth and death of the ego"
-Anonymous
Adam et Eve (1620) by Guido Reni
"Then love is sin, and let me sinful be"
-John Donne
Tristan and Isolde (1902) by Edmund Leighton
"but this is also not love/ I do not confuse necessity for love/ I do not confuse hunger/ with the need to fill myself/ with anything that will have me"
-Hanif Abdurraqib
Birth of Venus (1636) by Nicolas Poussin
“From the skin of the back. And the lovely repetition of stairs. And what is more generous than a window?” - Pat Schneider
Endymion (1872) by George Frederic Watts
“I imagine love as an indecent animal.”
-Hanif Abdurraqib
Marie-Madeleine en Extase (1606) by Le Caravage
“Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion.”
-Audrey Niffenegger
Orpheus and Eurydice (1869) by George Frederick Watts
"When I desire you, a part of me is gone: my want of you partakes of me."
-Anne Carson
Pygmalion et Galatée (1890) by Jean-Léon Gérôme
"All the nice things must come from gentleness, like a whisper from a mouth carrying words, and leaning to an ear, spilling through the teeth carefully so you'd know it's for you, and for you only."
-Anonymous
Amor Sacro e Amor Profano (1514) by Titian
"The first time she looked at me something gave inside me. I felt no longer solitary in the prison of my skin. She was letting me out into the world. To be where she is."
- Ursule Molinaro
Romeo och Julia på balkongen (1886) by Julius Kronberg
"Once I first tasted her I knew I would never recover. I would never know peace again knowing the little noises she makes against my mouth. I'd need to be intertwined for her as long as I could as many times as I could until I can’t anymore."
-Anonymous
Cast: Yelisey Kazakevich, Bella Soto, Grace Roden, Ramone Vargas Eugene, Ellie Pink, Lauren Rowlands, Grace O'Brien, Mateo Daffin, Zaari Colón, Leah Parrott, Arsalaan Abbas, Kat Quach, Skyler Piltch, Zafi Smith, Basil Mitchell, Maya Bhat, Axel Bautista, Christine An, Jordan Aschenbach, Bella Bremer, Magnolia Fiore, Dante Stella, Maez Gordon
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