Love and Bananas

Love and Bananas is a street-photography project about appetite, desire and the public performance of emotion. We cannot live without love, food and air. Two already come packaged, branded and fetishized. The third may soon arrive on supermarket shelves.

The work was photographed in different cities I pass through. It is made from fleeting encounters with people, objects and signs: tattoos, food, faces, gestures, luxury logos, cheap decorations and fragments of bodies. I use flash, close distance, strong colour and abrupt framing to keep the photographs physical and slightly unstable.

The project began from noticing how often love, hunger, sexuality, slapstick and loneliness appear together in ordinary public life. We tattoo love on our skin, queue for food, decorate ourselves, perform confidence, seduction or indifference, and still seem to carry a quiet hunger underneath.

I am drawn to people who let emotion leak into public space, even when they appear to be performing for the world. The camera becomes both witness and accomplice, turning the street into a small theatre of affection, appetite and embarrassment.

Under the humour, I see a fragile layer. These gestures of eating, touching, posing and displaying are also ways of resisting disappearance. Love and Bananas looks at this hunger with humour and empathy, as if holding up a mirror to a collective craving we cannot quite satisfy.