Talking about love sounds easy, but is it really so? Or is there something deeper and hidden, a real taboothat still conditions the way we live our relationships? Alessia Spina and Gio Blonde, with their project “The Taboo of Love”, decided to go deep into the question, creating a visual and psychosocial path that combines art and research to explore contemporary love dynamics.

After three years of intensive work, consisting of travel, interviews and photo shoots, the project turned into a book that combines images, reflections and stories of ordinary people. The goal? To investigate whether today there is a “taboo of love” just as, in the past, there was a taboo of sex.

Love is often taken for granted, but behind every relationship is a complexity of fears, desires and social conventions that, even today, create barriers that are difficult to overcome. Spina and Blonde asked themselves clearly: “Does the taboo of sex still exist or has it been replaced by a sexual libertinism that clashes with the idea of a committed relationship? And, most importantly, does the taboo of love, exist?”

A psychosocial and photographic exploration 

To answer these questions, they chose a powerful and evocative tool: analog photography. The authors met with people in various parts of Italy and in some European countries, inviting them to tell about their relationship with love. The semi-structured interviews were accompanied by shots representing the emotions that emerged, creating a dialogue between the external world and the more intimate and personal world of each participant.

But photography, in this project, is not just a means of documentation. It is, as the authors write, “a metaphorical and symbolic language” that allows them to express what words often fail to say. Through images, the people involved in the project were able to lay bare their feelings, without the defenses that verbal language offers-such as rationalizations or denials-making visible what usually remains hidden.

In addition to the photos, participants created graphic representations of their concept of love and later took pictures with disposable cameras, taking the project with them into their daily lives as well. The result is a mosaic of emotions and reflections that challenge conventions and invite reflection on how we experience emotional bonds.

“Is the love relationship constraint or freedom?” is one of the key questions of the project. And the answer, of course, varies from person to person, but it carries with it a universal truth: “Love is everything,” said one of the participants, “it is, in its irrationality, the only rational stuff that exists.”

If this journey intrigues you, Alessia Spina and Gio Blonde have just launched a crowdfunding campaign on Crowdbooks to finance the book’s publication. It’s an opportunity to support a project that not only explores love from a fresh perspective, but invites us to do the same, questioning what we think we know about one of the most complex and fascinating feelings in existence.

How about you, can you say “I love you”?