Why this photographer wants everyone to kiss

By Jacqui Palumbo, CNN

(CNN) — Beneath red tinsel and in the dim glow of club lighting, six young couples kiss, each seemingly wrapped up in their own little worlds. The intimate scene feels like a film still out of time, decade unclear, as they close their eyes and hold one another in the retro wood interior.

For the photographer Andrea Martí, who staged the scene inside of a vintage London nightlife hotspot, the point was for her subjects to yearn.

The image comes from the series “Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny,” titled after the 2021 viral essay about desexed blockbuster movies led by increasingly perfect-looking leads.

“Everyone has beautiful bodies in the media, but we’re seeing all these hot people and there’s no tension here,” Martí said in a video call. “There’s no desire, yearning, anything.”

She developed her series last year as part of her graduate studies at University of the Arts London. In her research, she also kept returning to the studies that say that Gen Z is having less sex, is averse to dating and is lonelier than previous generations.

“I don’t like to make general assumptions,” she said. “I think some communities are more sexually open, but I think from my experience, there is a general sense of loneliness, and an inability to connect with other people.”

She thinks one of the core issues is the sense of perpetual optimization. “Everyone wants to be tracking their calories and looking great and having successful careers and there’s no time for sensuality,” she explained. “This is something that I return to in my work, which is sensualism as an ideology.”

At the Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, a former men’s social club that now stages drag, burlesque and disco, she asked all of the participating couples to kiss. She found them with the help of casting director Melisa Ozcolak, after striking out on her own through fliers posted on campus and online. With real couples, the sense of love and familiarity was already present. And she’d been turned off by the idea of using actors when only older men responded to her online casting calls that explained the activities of the day. Still, there were uncertainties, she found — like people unexpectedly breaking up.

“I was like, come out with your partner or your situationship, and some people canceled on the day of the shoot or a couple days before because they were no longer together,” she recalled.

Over the course of eight hours, she photographed the couples who did show up around the venue, encountering one another in stairwells, making out in doorways, and lost in desire while bathed in red light. Bethnal Green is “a time capsule,” she said, with grubby tile floors, a stage framed by a kitschy giant red heart, and party tinsel lining the walls.

“It’s slightly disgusting,” she said, laughing. “I didn’t realize it had so much history, and it is such an iconic place.”

Martí’s images are steeped in nostalgia, from her use of 1960s styling, to her nod to Tom Wood’s classic photographs of teens clubbing in the 1980s; to her own mother’s recollections of late nights out.

“I remember my mom talking to me a lot about how back in the day they would go clubbing and they would play slow music at the end of the night for people to slow dance,” she recalled. “I think it was like trying to recreate that moment.”

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