Long-term Matrimonial Alliances

In the photographic portrait series “Long Term Matrimonial Alliances” Kristina Elisabeth Steinbock invites us inside the most intimate and private space of any home, the bedroom, belonging to a variety of Danish couples.
We do not usually visit the bedrooms of couples, who have been living together for a long time, and certainly we are not often invited to see what people look like once they are in bed. We are within the realm of portraiture and personal stories - stories of lives shared for various reasons. Kristina has placed the camera at the end of the bed, the foreground of duvets is slightly blurred, and it feels as if we are almost touching the bed sheets in some of the pictures. She is not IN the bed, but only just. With her, we become voyeurs – respectful voyeurs. She is looking for intimacy with her subjects- still she is not a documentary photographer trying to capture spontaneity. Rather the images are staged and the couples are posing; they are aware of the camera and she has allowed them to present themselves. The bed is usually the place where we are least concerned with being presentable. The bedroom is a place where one can escape from the gaze of others. The bed can be seen as the focus of all matrimonial alliances–in the bed intimate and private life takes place; sex, love, intimate conversations, but also rows and illness happens here.
Kristina does not show us these intimate moments but lets us imagine them. The beds are elevated to platforms of personal histories on which the couples pose. She has asked them to wear what they normally wear (or do not wear) at night. They have chosen the pose. The presence of the photographer has made people act or perform themselves as a couple in front of the camera, they seem to try to answer the question; “who are we as a couple”? And one of Kristina’s main concerns is exactly this, to investigate this kind of presented truth. Some are deliberately embracing to show their affection for each other, others are lying with folded hands in identical poses somehow uneasy looking, and yet again others are almost leaning away from each other, duvets sliding apart. Feelings of tender intimacy, passionate sex but also claustrophobia and disagreement come to mind. Seen as a whole the portraits make up a sociological statement; it seems that even in our most private lives we are all a product of class, gender and the time and culture in which we were born. The bedroom is filled with objects, which adds to the stories. An erotic painting on the wall, a jar of medicine on the bedside table, messy shelves, his alarm clock, her cosmetics, the lack of colours in one room, the blood red wall of another.
When looking at photographs our eyes are at once attracted to the unusual and surprising as well as the familiar. This is at times a pleasurable feeling and at other times this will make us feel slightly uneasy. As viewers we may read the intentions in the positions of their bodies, we may read beyond their intentions and understand their histories. We may see them and the objects that surround them as a product of a certain time in a certain place. Finally we may see our lives projected in them through the familiar and the strange. Kristina manages to comment on all these issues at once. Married or not, happy or not, people choose to live in couples, Kristinas photographs constitute a testimony of our times right now.

2007 Miriam Nielsen, Anthropologist and curator