Ochi Reyes

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Photographs of an Amorous Discourse
(2005)

This project was born out of a desire to investigate how the discourse of love is constructed through its image. Perfect love is something that exist onscreen, particularly through the cinema of Hollywood. I chose the 1932 Tarzan film to explore this representation of love partly because it was a defining moment in film history, becoming one of the seminal representations of the relationship; the cinematic version of the Adam and Eve story.

This set of images is about how we consume love as an idealised image that does not correspond to reality, but is constructed from artificial gender stereotypes, leaving no room for variation or subversion of the norm.

I divided up what I saw to be the different stages of love identified in the film into 16 categories and took Polaroid photographs of the screen. The instant image itself seemed to me to be the most appropriate medium to portray how society needs to extract abstract ideals with immediacy and transform them into consumable objects.

01. Encounter
02. Abduction
03. Resistance
04. Surrender
05. Surprise
06. Communication
07. Contact
08. Play
09. Pleasure
10. Plans
11. Risk
12. Protection
13. Compromise
14. The flight into the Abyss
15. The Abyss
16. The End