These Photos Tell The Love Story Of A Past Relationship (NSFW)
Endless photographers and artists have spent their lifetimes documenting their lovers as both public and personal venture. Time and again, the roles of lover and muse have folded into one and the same in front of the camera lens. The American photographer Sally Mann, for instance – who famously said she makes no separation between herself as artist and mother – has taken elegiac and haunting photographs of her family, including her husband, Larry, for decades. Lee Friedlander photographed his wife Maria for over 50 years, taking his first photograph of her in 1959. And Nobuyoshi Araki’s most seminal series, Sentimental Journey, traced his relationship with his late wife Yoko Aoki, in tender black and white portraits.
In among these short affairs and lifelong intimacies, loves lost and changed, those that lasted and those that didn’t, slots Michael Northrup’s project, Dream Away. It’s a beautifully honest and illuminating portrayal of Northrup’s former wife from the moment they met in the mid-1970s, and an ongoing visual reflection of their relationship as it unfolded across the years. It’s a dreamlike visual diary, a constellation of snapshots offering a moving portrait of their time together, from young lovers to parents.
“I grew up in a beautiful, historic, small, conservative Ohio town on two rivers,” Northrup begins. “I had great parents and was given a lot of opportunities, even if I didn’t always know in what direction I was headed. I learned to love irony and humour from those early years – my dad, being a doctor, surgeon and coroner, would bring humour to the dinner table on things like bowel obstructions. My whole family was great at extracting humour out of tragedy and that has given me a way of seeing. For me, creating images is all about my daily life, those meaningful pictures I’m able to extract from it, and the personal vision I bring to those visual narratives.”
Though the relationship ultimately wasn’t to last, the project remains some of Northrup’s most intimate and affecting work. The experience of making it helped him to picture intangible emotions and respond lovingly, through photography, to the things that happened around him. Here, Northrup picks out some of the images that defined the project, and tells us how his relationship became a playground for his creativity to flourish.
“I met my former wife in my home town in 1976 and I was immediately smitten. She was beautiful. I swore to myself I would not marry anyone from my home town or who I met in a bar. With her, it was both. We fell in love and became an item very quickly. At the same time, I was well into photography. I had my BFA, and had studied in San Francisco in 1971, Arizona in 1972, and under the tutelage of Minor White in Arlington, Massachusetts in 1973. I was well immersed and committed to my path in photography by the time I met my wife. It was perfect timing.”“I started photographing her the moment we met,” Northrup remembers. “She had just moved out of her parents’ home into her own apartment.” When asked if he can pinpoint the very first photograph he took of her, Northrup says, “I know the exact picture,” and points to a figurative nude in which his then-girlfriend is holding and moving a makeup mirror illuminated with lights at the edges. “We had so much fun making that first picture and I knew right then she’d continue to be a focus for me as long as I knew her.”“There was rarely a time she didn’t want to be a subject for me. She loved being photographed from the outset, I think. In the first two years of our relationship I was using a large format 4×5 view camera, I don’t think she doubted that I was serious about my art. Most people then were using a 35mm camera. I also think that because I sometimes involved myself in the image with her, she took some comfort in feeling company in front of the lens.”“I must admit, in those early days, I was not so interested in ‘the portrait’. I was more interested in the figure and the construction of the image, its context, and the mysteries in any of its ambiguities. That’s why I often cropped out the face in those images. I didn’t want the viewer to get lost in the person, but more the photograph; i.e. as with the Mona Lisa. I don’t think when you look at that painting you wonder what Mona did for a living.”Photographing one’s lover is a particularly emotive act – an act of love in itself. When talking about the experience of looking back at the images he makes, and what kind of relationship he has to them all these years later, Northrup says: “All I see now are memories and love. I still melt when I see her form in my images. Once I love someone it’s forever, no matter the problems.”And what would make him want to take an image of his wife? What moment of magic might compel him to get his camera out? “Often it was simply because she was available,” he says. “But there are those times where she’s absolutely inspirational in her willingness and ability to pose as a subject too. There were a lot of images where all she had to do was hold still for a second. I did always try and include a piece of my life in them. If they failed for others they would still resonate with me. I relied on the dynamic of my life for inspiration. Meaningful subject matter was always at arm’s length.”There’s something incredibly performative and playful about Northrup’s pictures of his former wife, even though they often appear in the snapshot style. She performed so well for the camera sometimes, he said, and sometimes they collaborated on bringing an image to life, but usually “it was an image I saw in front of me – my wife in a certain situation or position, for instance – or something I saw working in my head and wanted to carry out. Composition is always key with me. Mostly though, I think my wife knew she was beautiful, knew I found her beautiful, and wanted to make those images together.”When asked to choose particular favourites from his archive, the first one Northrup turned to was this one, entitled “Falling in Love” and taken in 1976. “This image would mark the beginning of our love and my seeing her persona through the eyes of a real romantic. It’s a black and white slide. The 35mm format let me be spontaneous and the follow-up processing of slides was more simplified than shooting negatives and making enlargements. The slides helped me to slowly move away from my view camera and rely more on perception than conception, to be able to capture moments like this.”“This one is ‘Art Object’ and I took it in 1977. It was inspired by the legendary Hungarian-born photographer André Kertész’s image ‘Satiric Dancer’, and it was taken during a time when we were just getting serious about our future together. I started looking at her more formally as my subject. Everything became a little more serious.”“This image, ‘Putting It All Together’, 1981, was taken when we were just about to have a child. It’s also where I would find serendipity to introduce a great level of play into the process of creating images that continues today. We were returning from swimming at a lake and happened upon this tyre fire a couple of hundred yards from the road. We drove down towards it, hopped out of the car and made this image quickly before anyone knew we were there. I had no time to really think about it so I just went right for the obvious. I couldn’t have conceptualised anything like this – it just happened. Most of my favourite images were done relying purely on chance. I find the more time I have to futz with an image, the less successful it is.”Northrup photographed his wife for over a decade, the span of their entire relationship before they parted ways, and over that time they went from young lovers to husband and wife to parents. The process, he says, taught him about the relationship between artist and subject-lover. “I make an image when what I see hits me viscerally and visually. I always say I can make an image, but after that I have no idea what to do with it, so it’s been amazing for me to watch how others see this work. It helps me to better understand my own images as the years unfold.”
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