Of love and old age

On the photographic and editorial project Advanced Love by Ari Cohen

Abstract

This work aims to analyze the passions of affection among elderly couples in relation with specific forms of life that are opposed to images and imagery of the figurative and visual manifestation of old age. For this purpose, we take the project by Ari Seth Cohen entitled Advanced Love (2018), which portrays and interviews representative couples of different aesthetic tastes, reproducing in clothing, corporeality and in their speeches a sensitive sharing of life in common embodied in various materialities. The photographed set initially places the assumption of a debate that divides the subjects by the triad of excess, golden mean and deficiency. Historically, the middle way appears as the mark of balance, common sense and good taste (or good tone), as Aristotle already stated in The Nicomachean Ethics, referring to various segments of life. In the examined empirical, this unified view of "good taste" or "good sense" that should be shared by the elderly is broken. On the contrary, Cohen's project obliges us to rethink them in terms that supplant the social adaptations of love and the ways in which they come together and points to a modulated and coexistent encounter. The theoretical-analytical reasoning of the corpus approach is articulated with postulates of discursive semiotics in some of its unfolding: figurative and plastic analysis of the image, studies of interactional practices and forms of life in its various instances of integration - signs, strategies , practices and lived experiences.