Love Songs, International Center of Photography review — sex has never seemed so shallow

Organising a photography exhibition around the topic of love leaves a lot of room to roam; the list of artists, locations and periods to choose from is practically infinite. And yet, somehow, the International Center of Photography’s Love Songs: Photography and Intimacy manages to suggest that it’s a cramped, confining rubric. Even though the show ranges across continents, styles, sensibilities and sexualities, it winds up drawing the eye to a handful of tired tropes. Comely nudes, rumpled beds, pouting glances, preening poses, sleeping partners, mirrors, kisses, embraces — all this visual debris floats on the surface of the deepest human experiences.

That’s not a hazard of the medium. Alfred Stieglitz photographed Georgia O’Keeffe, Harry Callahan immortalised his Eleanor, Emmet Gowin set down his elemental feelings for his wife Edith, all of them preserving a molten emotion that never dries, never dies. “My life as an artist follows so closely my meeting Edith and my love for her that I can think of no way of seeing these two separately,” Gowin said.

Those sentimental epics don’t make an appearance at the ICP, but a similar combination of loyalty, gratitude and clear-eyed scrutiny does, in the work of Sally Mann. The collodion portraits she made of her husband’s nude body are paragons of empathy. She had known Larry’s body for 40 years when he was diagnosed with muscular dystrophy and, in the series, she confronts his wasting flesh with a combination of tenderness and detachment. Mann protects him from the camera’s brutal lens, using the streaked and blistered surface of her prints as metaphors for damage wrought by illness and time.

In “Hephaestus”, an intricate crackling runs across Larry’s torso from throat to groin, like an X-ray view of exquisite decay. Mann has described her set of unerotic nudes as “one big caress”, but a voyeuristic frisson also ripples through these odes to mortality, which stun, sadden and seduce.

The high point begins and ends with Mann. Otherwise, curator Sara Raza has devoted two floors and a half-dozen rooms to a distracted meander through the landscape of sex, relationships and . . . other stuff. The pictures range from the rapturous to the ridiculous, selected according to criteria that escape me.

What, for instance, justifies the inclusions of Aikaterini Gegisian’s mediocre collages, which feature clippings from magazines rearranged into a garbled feminist statement? Or Sheree Hovsepian’s mixed-media works casting her sister’s girlish body into hollow, semi-abstract arrangements of wood and string? Hovsepian writes that her sister is a “stand-in for myself”, which is a tantalising revelation, since many intense relationships rest on a vein of vanity. But if this is the self-love portion of the exhibition, then surely Raza could have recruited a more virtuosic crew of narcissists.

Or at least a more varied set of physiques. Mann is the only artist here who dares to examine an older body. The photographers and models are straight, gay, white, black and Asian, but all are thin and almost none is over 40. You’d think love was like gymnastics: only for the lithe and wrinkle-free.

René Groebli, a photojournalist and war correspondent, married his young wife Rita between assignments in 1951. The couple honeymooned in a Paris hotel so enchantingly shabby that it could practically have been a movie set, with cherry-blossom wallpaper, a brass bedstead and lace curtains. Rita lounges among tumbled sheets, lacy negligees and silk stockings, then appears, perfectly coiffed, at a café table, a rose at her collar, a cigarette in its holder, a landscape of empty tables and glowing sconces receding into the mirror behind her.

Groebli’s series was published in 1954 as Das Auge der Liebe (The Eye of Love), an irresistibly risqué concoction of nudity, languor and furtiveness. And yet the pictures had an old-fashioned quality even then, like a polite remake of Brassaï’s gritty bordellos from the 1930s. Groebli made a real relationship look like a period piece.

Hervé Guibert belonged to a different time and a different sexual subculture, but his black and white portraits of Thierry Jouno share the same old delight in the faultlessness of youth. We see Thierry bathing in a tub or bathed in sunlight, shirtless and stretching in Palermo, Rome, Siena, Munich and Amsterdam. Pretty people in pretty places yield pretty pictures, a truism that launched a trillion Instagram posts, but at the ICP the context draws attention to how little we know about Guibert and Jouno’s relationship, how it evolved (or failed to) or how they envisioned a future together. There’s a tragic dimension to the erotic charge: both men died of Aids before they had a chance to age together.

The possibility of early death lurks in every love story, and Nobuyoshi Araki made the connection explicit. He grouped together the honeymoon nudes he took of his wife Yoko in 1971 with the chronicle of her death from ovarian cancer, 20 years later. Here, too, the elisions are stunning, and not just because we see nothing of what takes place between first delight and final grief. Araki built a career on images of women bound, spread out, dangling, submissive, slurping and supine — a panoply of aggressive “love” that needs to be seen in counterpoint with his meditation on Yoko.

An insightful exhibition about intimacy, like a wise therapist, would distinguish between passion and self-indulgence. At the ICP, they mix in a puerile swirl, largely because so few works get beyond early bursts of infatuation. RongRong, visiting Japan from China, met inri and found that the only language they shared was photography. Their long-distance courtship involved exchanging sexy pictures, which they captioned in Chinese characters and sometimes in gushing broken English: “I want in die!! make love everyday with you!! only you!! only you!!”

At least they are real lovers, which is more than you can say for the characters in Karla Hiraldo Voleau’s “Another Love Story”. When Hiraldo Voleau discovered that she was sharing her lover, codenamed “X”, with another woman, she exacted revenge in the form of art. Pages from the transcript of a phone conversation with her rival alternate with snapshots of an ignorantly blissful idyll of sunsets and beaches. The words may or may not accurately represent an interaction that may or may not have taken place with a person who may or may not exist — but one thing is certain: the handsome man in the photos isn’t X, but an actor hired to re-enact the photographer’s memories. The whole thing is a fake representation of a faker’s deceptions.

Sophie Calle has done this kind of thing with an enigmatic touch, mixing diary, observation, fiction and documentation in work of sublime untrustworthiness. Hiraldo Voleau has a cruder technique and blunter message, one that unites many artists in the show: “Look who I got to sleep with for a while!”

To September 11, icp.org