Levine Barbara - People Kissing

W hile it may not be polite to stare at people kissing in public, and its practically illegal to spy on people kissing in private, its downright irresistible to look at people kissing in a photograph. We immediately start creating a story from the image: Who are these kissers? What is their relationship? What do they see in each other? Is it mutual? Are they kissing the way I kiss, or want to be kissed? If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a picture of people kissing can tell a thousand stories. The images collected here, spanning one hundred years, are a testament to our inherent curiosity, vicarious pleasure, occasional voyeurism, and constant delight in catching other people in a moment of connection. Our fascination is understandable. Most human expressions of emotion are solitary acts: we cry, we smile, we furrow our brow, we scream, we chuckle. We can express these emotions solo.

When we see pictures of people in an emotional state, they communicate something essential about one person at one moment in time. Kissing, though, is a wondrous, collaborative act. It is one of the most recognizable, simple expressions in our physical vocabulary, yet because it involves two (or more!) people, a photograph of people kissing conveys not only a feeling, but an entire relationship. What a range of emotions and dynamics are captured in a picture of a kiss! A kiss can be a friendly peck, a romantic smooch, or a lusty deep dive. It can be as tender as a mother kissing her newborn, as theatrical as a photo booth goof-off, or as false as a frenemies selfie. A kiss can be flirtatious or funny; a kiss can be covert or unwanted.

Looking at the photographs in these pages, we find kisses that are childlike or sexy; clandestine or brazen; utterly candid or staged for comedy. Before the age of photography, kissing was a private, secular affair, and widespread images of people kissing were fairly uncommon. The ancient Greeks occasionally painted kissing lovers (of all genders) on ceramics, and centuries-old Japanese drawings have been found depicting kissing within the intimate world of courtesans and their patrons. In the European fine-art tradition, before the rise of the camera, a mythological or Biblical kiss might come to life, but rarely was an ordinary couple kissing deemed an appropriate subject to memorialize in art. It wasnt until the nineteenth century, with the advent of Victorian postcards and illustrated novels, that viewers were treated to images of everyday people like themselves engaged in one of the most common of physical interactions. Photography changed everything: suddenly the most intimate expressions of affection could be captured, reproduced, and sharedboth privately and publicly.

The portrait studio became a staging area where kisses could be posedeven if the need to keep stock-still for the duration of an exposure meant that portrait kisses often came across as strangely formal. As handheld, inexpensive film cameras proliferated in the early twentieth century, so did the variety of images of people kissing. No longer limited to a studio or a souvenir pose, couples dared to be more spontaneous or candid with their kissingbe they same-sex couples photographed by a knowing friend or all manner of family and romantic relationships captured by a stranger. Many of the most delightful photographs in this book are from an era in popular photography when the subjects seem to be giddily enjoying a new freedom by immortalizing it with a personal camera, in a carnival photo booth, on a comic picture postcard, or with a Polaroid snapshot. In that predigital era, before every moment of a relationship could be preserved by a selfie and unlimited cloud storage, those new forms of instant photography were groundbreaking ways of capturing and preserving the spontaneous emotions of a kiss that had previously been unrecordable. When it comes to romance, it is universally acknowledged that kissing is not only a rewarding end in itself, but a prelude to something more.

Kissing, as the analogy goes, is just first base. Many photographs of a kiss are laced with the innuendo of whats to follow. A lover might be tempted to add a caption or inscription that carries the idea a bit further. While remaining chaste (and safe from interstate postal regulations!), a picture of a kiss could signify far more than what appears at face value. In a coy twist, a surprising number of early photographs come with captions referring to the supposed public health benefits of exchanging a kiss: after all, who wouldnt want to lock lips if the shared microbes might serve as an inoculation against disease? But especially in the often puritanical United States, these same references to cooties or catching it take on a darker shade, at least in hindsight. They betray, perhaps unintentionally, an acknowledgment that in a kiss, two bodies are interacting, with the implication that what follows might be serious, forbidden, or even dangerous.

And to our sensibilities now, many of the innuendos and images seem more lecherous and inappropriate than funny or clever. Many of these photos reveal the growing influence of the movies on snapshot photography. The first on-screen movie kiss was captured in 1896, and within a few decades, movie romances would become a pervasive, if often unconscious, template for amateur photographersfrom poses that mimic the starlets or heroes celebrated in photoplay magazines to direct visual quotes from popular films. Capturing ordinary people in this cinematic vocabulary was a way to close the gap, even for just a shutter-click instant, between ones humble reality and the dreamland of the movies. In the world of photography, every woman can be a femme fatale and every man a seductive Valentino. With lighter and less expensive film cameras like the Brownie, and later the Polaroid and Kodak Instamatic cameras, photographers became more mobile and their inquisitive eye and portable equipment gave them access to photograph people kissing on city streets, parks, beaches, and other gathering places.

It is natural that when we look at a snapshot of people kissing, we tend to focus on the relationship between the photos subjects but often forget that there was a photographer present, and thus the implication of a triangulated relationship. Who was allowed access to this intimate moment? Was it a trusted friend, an encouraging collaborator, or a voyeur? These photos invite us to imagine not only the visible relationship but the covert one as well. As photographs of all manner of kissing became more popular, the idea of the kiss as something strictly private began to give way, replaced by the idea that the photographed kiss can be not only a public act, but a kind of performance for the camera. Many engaging photographs in this collection document an intentional pose. Its not too much of a leap to connect the idea behind a vintage image such as Mister Seymour Hicks and Miss Ellaline Terrisswho perform their romantic engagement on a postcard to be sent out to friends and family with the now ubiquitous sports stadium Kiss-Cams, where unsuspecting (or all-too-suspecting) couples find themselves on the JumboTron and are encouraged by the crowd to show their affection on-camera. There, among twenty thousand baseball or hockey fans, the couple either shyly or gamely (or mock lustfully) goes at it mouth-to-mouth, to the cheers or jeers of the crowd.

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