What if We Were Lovers?

Explores intimacy formed and undone within contemporary dating culture. Through unstaged photographs made during real encounters on dating apps, the work traces fleeting closeness shaped by speed, choice, and emotional uncertainty.

What If We Were Lovers? is a research-led practice rooted in personal experience, exploring and reflecting on the paradoxes of contemporary dating culture within a post-digital context. Like many, I navigated dating apps as a gateway to "true love"—a portal promising convenience and an infinite pool of possibilities. Since 2023, I have operated within this system, meticulously formatting profiles, filtering matches, managing expectations as if managing a product, and reflecting on repeated failures. Despite sincere emotional investment, stable intimacy remained elusive, replaced instead by the rapid generation and dissipation of connections.

I am struck by the startling speed at which intimacy is now constructed and dismantled: one date said 'I love you' to me on our second meeting—an utterance that lacks weight in this fast-paced era, no longer pointing toward commitment or continuity. While romance often involves the unforeseen factors, the formatted and formulated nature of modern dating has become, itself, a process of de-romanticization. This lead me to think: is technology fundamentally altering how we perceive and practice love?

These images were made with the full consent of the subjects, captured during genuine dates and shared moments rather than through staging or direction. Some encounters lasted only a single meeting; others developed into friendships or emotionally significant, if undefined, connections. I deliberately avoid traditional documentary approaches to relationships, as well as explicit representations of intimacy. Instead, the photographs function as fragments of shared time—passing landscapes, hands held while crossing streets, shadows cast by sunlight, reflections of each other through the lens, or photographs taken quickly by strangers. These fleeting interactions resist narrative completion.

Beyond the photographs, I archive dating diaries, reflections, and fragments of digital communication, including private messages and social media traces. Amidst tenderness and heartbreak, truth and performance, what remains are not stable narratives of love, but traces—memories, projections, and emotional residues.

Beyond the calculated games of modern romance, the work seeks a return to the presence of the moment—the trajectory of light, the passing landscape, and the sincere exchange. It leaves us with a lingering question: What if we were lovers?