EROS

© Nathalie Guio - Image from the EROS photography project © Nathalie Guio - Image from the EROS photography project © Nathalie Guio - Image from the EROS photography project View all images ↓
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Eros explores intimacy, love, and identity through a personal archive, from my parents holding hands to my mom’s ashes resting in a lake, alongside a portrait of Pixy Liao and Todo y Nada, a 25-year love story that questions how we represent intimacy.

Eros reflects on intimacy, love, beauty, and identity through a personal archive of found images, printed fragments, and photographs stamped with a red EROS mark, tracing signs of affection and desire.

Beginning with a photograph of my parents holding hands and another of the lake where my mom’s ashes rest, the project explores the space between these two images as the place where my own story, identity, and desire emerge. Through the encounter between personal memories and inherited visual narratives, Eros questions how ideas of love, beauty, and human bonds are constructed, repeated, and transformed.

The archive becomes both a mirror with memory and a tool for self-representation, allowing me to reconsider the images that have shaped my understanding of intimacy and reclaim the right to name my own story. By challenging established ideals and affective canons, Eros proposes the personal archive as a living, evolving practice through which we can negotiate our identities and rewrite our narratives.

As part of this ongoing search, I sought out artist Pixy Liao and made a portrait of her while we talked about her work and her approach to representing intimate relationships. Much later, in Buenos Aires, I encountered artists Gisela Volá and Nicolás Pousthomis at the launch of their book Todo y Nada, which recounts their love story over 25 years together. These encounters expanded my exploration of how intimacy is represented, remembered, and reimagined, bringing my personal archive into dialogue with other ways of seeing and narrating love.

Ultimately, Eros became a way for me to embrace my family’s transformation after my mother died, as I was becoming a woman. Through this process, my understanding of connection and intimacy expanded beyond the boundaries of family and romantic love, which no longer occupied the center. I began to experience myself as interconnected with other species, with my own self, and with the world around me.

© Nathalie Guio - Image from the EROS photography project
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What is Eros? Eros is an archive that brings together a selection of historical, cultural, and personal images that have shaped my understanding of love, the body, and human relationships. It includes drawings by Leonardo da Vinci (The Vitruvian Man, Leda and the Swan), postcards from the Museum of Sex, representations of Adam and Eve, the cover of the book A General Theory of Love etc.

© Nathalie Guio - Image from the EROS photography project
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The archive began with two photographs: one I took of my parents holding hands, and another of Lake Tota, where my mom’s ashes rest. Between these two images, I began tracing the delicate threads of love, loss, memory, and desire that weave together my own story.

© Nathalie Guio - Image from the EROS photography project
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My grandmother’s ring emerges as a symbol of family ties and lineage. The narratives that shape me begin within my closest circle and extend through a genealogical tree that, whether I am aware of it or not, nourishes the stories I create. Recognizing this lineage is the first step in untangling which parts of my identity are truly my own and which I have inherited.

© Nathalie Guio - The first embrodery my mom made when she was 7 years old. It was 63 years ago.
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The first embrodery my mom made when she was 7 years old. It was 63 years ago.

© Nathalie Guio - My mom and my sister.
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My mom and my sister.

© Nathalie Guio - Image from the EROS photography project
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I photographed Pixy Liao in her home, seeking a conversation about gender roles, love, and representation. Her work informs my exploration of how the female gaze challenges photographic conventions and reimagines the ways we represent intimacy and human bonds.

© Nathalie Guio - Image from the EROS photography project
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My friends and I collected love letters from our ex boyfriends. It was a collection we made to understand common patterns. Sometimes we ended up laughing about them.

© Nathalie Guio - Image from the EROS photography project
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Todo y Nada by Gisela Volá and Nicolás Pousthomis tells the story of their 25-year relationship through two distinct photographic perspectives, weaving together an evolving bond and documenting the everyday moments, transformations, and experiences that shape a shared life.

© Nathalie Guio - My parents holding hands before my mom died.
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My parents holding hands before my mom died.

© Nathalie Guio - Image from the EROS photography project
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A photogram I made in the color darkroom. The form reveals itself as light touches its layers, much like intimacy unfolds over time. I think of photography as a witness to the invisible threads that connect us, holding traces of our relationships as they transform.

© Nathalie Guio - Image from the EROS photography project
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Discovering women artists and understanding the female gaze as a place of refuge allowed me to see my own experience as part of a larger, interconnected fabric of women’s experiences.

© Nathalie Guio - Image from the EROS photography project
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II took this photograph with an Oktomat, a plastic camera, at my older sister’s wedding. As she was leaving our family home, her departure opened up an absence that would transform our family bonds and my understanding of intimacy and belonging.

© Nathalie Guio - Image from the EROS photography project
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In this photograph, taken ten years after we scattered my mother’s ashes in the lagoon, my other sister and I are letting go of each other’s hands. She was leaving home, and I was moving abroad, each of us stepping into a different life.

© Nathalie Guio - Image from the EROS photography project
© Nathalie Guio - What lies on the other side of fear: the promise of a different life, or the disorientation of a world turned upside down?
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What lies on the other side of fear: the promise of a different life, or the disorientation of a world turned upside down?

© Nathalie Guio - Image from the EROS photography project
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I felt lost, unsure of where bonds and affections had gone after my family transformed. I no longer knew where to place my love, or how to understand belonging in a life where the relationships that once defined it had changed.

© Nathalie Guio - Image from the EROS photography project
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I was becoming a woman, and I needed to see myself, to recognize my changing body and understand the person I was becoming. Part of this process was learning to see myself as separate from my family, to recognize my own identity beyond the bonds that had shaped me, and to discover who I could become on my own.

© Nathalie Guio - Image from the EROS photography project
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A drawing my baby niece gave me when I left home to live on my own ¨I love you, titi¨says the drawing. A small gesture of love that became a keepsake, holding the tenderness of leaving and the invisible threads that continue to connect us across distance and change.

© Nathalie Guio - Image from the EROS photography project
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My cat, Milagros (Miracles), became my new family and changed the way I understood belonging. To question love is also to expand our understanding of bonds, exploring other forms of companionship, care, and belonging beyond romantic narratives and traditional models of intimacy.

© Nathalie Guio - Image from the EROS photography project
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In his reflections on Eros, Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung challenges the reduction of love to sexuality, describing Eros instead as the force that connects us. “Eros is not sex, but being connected.”

EROS by Nathalie Guio

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