A Valentine’s heart ♡ is a stylized representation that doesn’t accurately resemble a real heart. It is bright red because red is widely considered the color of love and passion, symbolizing the intense emotions that we imagine come from the heart. Dave Hickey describes the color “red as an attribute of the world, [that] is always there.” Valentine’s day is saturated with this red, heart-shaped chocolates, red wine, cards, balloons and roses. If we set aside the artificiality of Valentine’s Day we might find room to look at love plainly even if the lens of looking plainly eludes us these days.
Love exists in earnest and trivial ways at the same time, artificial and real, in tones of red and all other colors at the same time, in seriousness and lightheartedness, in overt and subtle ways that language and symbols can’t wholly represent but that Alice’s photos direct our attention to in playful combinations of these qualities.
Taking a photograph can involve love in the act of looking. It can be a gaze or a glance, and is also often driven by the desire to capture a moment so that it can be passed on and not forgotten. On our phones, in photo albums, as they come out of the machine at CVS or develop in the chemical baths of a red-lit dark room— the resulting photograph reminds us of the looking that inspired the photo to be taken. Harold Feinstein, famous for documenting Coney Island life from the age of fifteen, said, “I love this life, I feel like I am always catching my breath and saying, ‘Oh! Will you look at that?’ Photography has been my way of bearing witness to the joy I find in seeing the extraordinary in ordinary life.”
There is more to photography than documenting life encounters in time and space. The act of looking while taking a photo is like Cupid’s arrows. Looking through the lens of a camera at a boy’s shadow as he himself photographs a bright red corvette, at a street sign for “Memory Lane,” or at a red flower in a vase on a restaurant table anticipating date night capture more than the image we see. A photographer’s emotional awareness of the subject impacts how the photo is captured and what the photo reveals. The arrows are also directed at us.