Jake Naughton and Juan Anibal Sosa Iglesias “When We Were Strangers”

United Photo Industries

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What does it mean to be in love?

For eight years, in images, writing and life, plain and simple, we have tried to tease out the answer. Love is a cliche, an idea so easy to imagine but impossible to grasp. Like an overripe fruit, it collapses with a bit of pressure into cloying sweetness and the faint sense of something lost.

At its most basic, falling in love means cleaving away something of yourself and becoming something else. It’s painful and hard, but also carries the potential for profound transformation.

When We Were Strangers is the first part of a lifelong project deconstructing love through the prism of our relationship. This first chapter is a love poem of sorts, one that charts what happens when two people attempt to become something more and less than that, when we are more unknown stranger to each other than anything else.

But love is an ouroboros that eats the past that came before it. Who was I before you?

We are interested in the frayed edges, the messy intersections, the elements of ourselves lost and new facets gained in the process, and the limits to all of that.