of valentine’s day editfeatures carefully selected posters and prints from the Magnum Shop, looking at love and intimacy through the lens of Magnum photographers.
Raymond Depardon captures the decisive moment of a kiss at the Guggenheim Museum, with other couples forming a visual echo beneath the museum’s famous spiral ramp. Similarly, Leonard Freed’s image “Youth of West Berlin” contrasts a couple, one embracing while the other appears depressed. Two of his lovers, photographed in Berlin’s Tiergarten in 1965, suggest the newfound freedom of the cultural and sexual revolution.
Kisses are sprinkled throughout the collection. It appears to be freely given and unobserved. Alec Soth’s “Two Towels” offers a different interpretation, with a pair of towel swans kissing and forming a heart with their outstretched necks.some of his projects Niagara, Soth went to Niagara Falls, where newlyweds and runaway couples romance in the “honeymoon capital” of the world. His sober images of outdated hotel rooms are punctuated by a misplaced but tender nostalgia.
More than just a visual motif, Elliott Erwitt used couples as a way to bring sensibility to the forefront of his images. “This topic is very interesting to me,” Elliott said. “I myself have been half of that sometimes, sometimes happily, sometimes not.” He returned to this subject throughout his career as a photographer, photographing scenes such as Parisian street life. I was drawn to the visual symmetry of the pair and the expression of quiet intimacy, as seen in the glimpse of a couple dancing in the kitchen.