The Honeymoon | 2015

The Honeymoon

“…Once again an enigmatic photography find, an archive with an anonymous story of a couple. Anonymity is in fashion and is auctioned. We know almost nothing about them, only
that they were from Maryland…” – Katja Petrowskaja, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

“…a beautiful evocation of a forgotten age, the absence of information only adding to the mystery and romance. Were these genuine images of a real romance, or a carefully posed travelogue? Taking in locations from the Eastern Bloc through to the Caribbean, US and Europe, they offer up a world of lost delight…”  – Wallpaper*

"The book you hold in your hands might look like a photography book, but in fact it is a detective story – a puzzle, a mystery, even perhaps a thriller – whose solution may still be, tantalisingly, just about within reach. These achingly nostalgic photographs record a honeymoon: so much we can see. But more than that we don’t really know. They’re taken from a box of Ektachrome slides that came up for auction as part of a larger mixed lot, and though some individual slides have hand-written captions, in many ways these are found images, with little in the way of context or background information attached to them. If a story, here, is being told, then by and large we have to construct its narrative for ourselves. ...

Whatever the truth of that particular matter, something in these 1960s photographs reminded me of Ruskin’s story. Was the world really so brilliantly coloured then? Were the skies so intensely blue?

Were the reds so brilliantly, shockingly red? Was everyone so beautifully turned out?

Did all Americans dress like Jack and Jacqueline Kennedy? ..."

Christopher Stocks

abstract from his Essay "Three Views of a Happy Time",

In: Magdalena Cwiklicka (ed.): The Honeymoon. London: Zettabyte, 2015