Juan and I met eight years ago at a coffee shop in Washington, D.C. We had been messaging for weeks before that on OKCupid, trying to find a time to get together. Of course, when the date finally came, I was late and Juan had left his phone at home. But we found each other, and spent our first date in motion, walking around the city and feeling out the contours of what was forming between us.
At the time, I was an intern with dreams of becoming a photographer; but almost as soon as we met, I started photographing him, and us. The early pictures are as aimless and saccharine as you might imagine: our idiot smiles after the first time we had sex, goofy glimpses of Juan, closeup images of his lips. You get the drift. But quickly, things shifted. What started as an unconscious impulse rapidly became something deeper—a collaborative and deeply intentional project to understand what it meant, individually and in general, to be in love.
Though Juan and I are profoundly different people, we share a philosophy on love: It is work. It is hard. It is geologic in its aspirations but minute in its practice. It is perhaps the most difficult and most essential project of our lives. And so we wanted to document it.
We share a philosophy on love: It is work. It is hard. It is geologic in its aspirations but minute in its practice.
The resulting photographs comprise our new book, When We Were Strangers—itself the first chapter in our lifelong project called Here Is What I Know About Love. They are an attempt to chart what happens when two people try to become something more than themselves, during that period when we are more unknown to each other than anything else.
Taken as a whole, it is an honest and intimate look at this journey we’re on together, to understand and deconstruct love through the prism of our relationship. And though there are many projects about straight relationships, there are a dearth of ones about queer people living and loving, so our project is an attempt to correct that gap, and hopefully make space for other, more diverse expressions of love.
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Jake Naughton
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Jake Naughton
DATE: 06/22/2016 ALBUQUERQUE CAPTION: Images from a family vacation to Albuquerque, New Mexico.
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Jake Naughton
DATE: 01/29/2016 CAPTION: Juan and I celebrate our fifth anniversary at the Spruceton Inn in the Catskills.
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When We Were Strangers, Naughton's book co-authored with Juan Anibal Sosa Iglesias, will be published in February 2019 by Red Hook Editions. Additionally, the work will be exhibited at United Photo Industries gallery in Brooklyn, New York City, from February 14 to March 22.