The lovers - Lauren Fleishman

As a photographer, Lauren Fleishman has always been attracted to the beauty of love and lovers. Her project extends this attraction to a domain that is largely unexplored, and more importantly, not well documented visually. Like her other work, this project addresses both artistic and documentary angles: sociology and the human geography of emotions, as well as the aesthetics of the body. In this work, color photographs are combined with interviews where the subjects, elderly couples intimately involved for over five decades, describe their love and relationship. Couples from different backgrounds provide a look at the realities of love: how the previous generation experienced it, survived it, and, more importantly, how it appears in their lives. The body politics of the project become especially clear when gay and lesbian couples or couples with ill spouses are considered. In this respect, Fleishmans pictures play a central role in addressing homophobia and increasing awareness of age-related issues. Fleishman has been working on her project in the very intimate settings of her subjects homes. She has even photographed the couple holding the title of longest married in the world. The viewer sees how their love reflects and how this love has grown and adapted over time. The intimacy of the photographs creates an interesting effect on people both intriguing and surprising showing that viewers share some of the feelings that she put on her work. The beauty in the pictures might not often be immediate, but the aesthetic is compassionate and tries to almost see as young couples. The visual aspect of the project is complimented with the very personal interviews with the couples. Lauren Fleishman considers these an indispensable part of the work, always conducted before she makes the photograph. It is this process of remembering that can bring out a deep tenderness in the couples. As they speak, it is as if they are weaving their own love stories. Fleishman is the photographer, there to record what is already present. For Fleishman, working with these couples often feels like a last chance to do this together. Her personal relationship to this project is based in personal experience; after her grandfather's death, she found a series of love letters written to her grandmother during the Second World War. The letters connected her to her grandfather and his sixty-three year long marriage in a way that she had not been able to connect with him in life. By witnessing his youth through his love of her grandmother, Lauren was able to more clearly see him. Finding these letters set her off on a long journey of research, starting with couples in the neighborhood in New York where she then lived and continuing throughout The United States and Europe.