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Love, released by National Geographic Books on January 8, 2008, offers a unique look at this driving force of human existence, the root of our survival as a species, the common denominator of every culture, race, and religion. Love rules everyone, with or without our consent, exercising immense power to bring goodness and joy, evil and sorrow, and everything in between, sometimes all at once. It touches us from before we are born until we die. So great is love’s reach that its absence can be felt as acutely as its presence.
The 250 photographs in Love, were taken all over the world by leading contemporary artists, such as William Eggleston, Mary Ellen Mark, and Martin Parr, legendary photographers including Robert Doisneau, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Andre Kertesz, and Brassaï, as well as rising young talents like Guillaume Herbaut, Jane Evelyn Atwood, Simon Wheatley and Jeffrey Aaronson.
Love's primal power makes it an obvious subject for artistic expression. And love has indeed been exalted, examined, explored and deplored ad infinitum in almost every imaginable medium. Yet the subject remains fresh because love is not only universal, but intriguing and amorphous. Despite its universal nature and the countless words, pictures and music devoted to it, no one knows exactly what love is.
Because each of us experiences love as an individual, because it is so personal and subjective, because we love so many things, in so many ways—God, our families, our friends, ourselves, our pets, our possessions, and our pleasures—coming up with a concise, catch-all definition is impossible. Compared to love in air-gulping, pulse-pounding, palm-sweating life, all definitions of the word, taken together, seem formal and inadequate. No one ever looks into the eyes of another person and says, “I feel solicitude for your welfare, delight in your presence and desire for your approval.” We say, “I love you.”
The pictures in Love explore the passions and pleasures, the anxieties, the pain of separation and loss, the ecstasy of unions and reunions, the declarations and rejections, the romance and the religious fervor that are all part of love. They take the viewer on a kaleidoscopic spin to a lover’s lane on Russia’s Pacific coast, a techno singles bar in Manhattan, a farm in rural Montana, a bateau mouche on the Seine and a family portrait photographed on the surface of the moon. All in the name of love.
Obtain Love from Amazon, Barnes and Noble and other fine book stores.
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