The Lover gathers photographs in which desire, attachment or intimacy become legible in public. Sometimes the relationship is clear. Elsewhere, the figures seem to occupy the role without giving much away about what exists between them.
Jung’s Lover archetype first gave me a way to recognize the recurrence as something broader than romance: the pull toward another person, toward beauty, contact and the possibility of becoming less separate. Lacan made that reading less secure. His objet petit a, the object-cause of desire, describes the elusive quality we locate in another person but can never fully possess. Desire reaches toward someone real, but it is also shaped by fantasy and by whatever we imagine that person might resolve.
The photographs hold those two readings together. Intimacy can be real without being transparent. Someone may be loved and still partly serve as an image of what the other person wants. Someone is being wanted. Whether they are also being seen is harder to know.