Love Through the Lens of Rob Tennent

I have always pulled ideas from memories. My first encounters with love were from my parents, who I watched through the viewfinder of my father’s film camera. Every year we would go away as a family, and he would hand me the camera, teaching me which buttons to press. My parents would pose in front of a pool, arms around each other, and I would press the shutter. Looking back now, I realise that my relationship with a camera is also my relationship with love. It began in those early moments — a kind of innocence in capturing people as they were, full of affection, unaware of how permanent those frames would become.

As a child, photography felt like a kind of play. I would hang a bedsheet in the garden and ask neighbours and cousins to stand in front of it. I documented anyone willing to give me a moment of their time. Back then, I didn’t think of it as art — it was simply a way of holding onto a feeling. And, in many ways, that has never changed. For me, photography is about creating an image that tells a story. I want a photograph to feel like a memory, even if it doesn’t belong to you.

I’ve carried that philosophy with me in every project, whether in a staged studio portrait or a stolen frame between takes. The photos I make are often stylised versions of real life, but always rooted in truth. Sometimes the simplest set-up — a wall, a window, a subject bathed in late afternoon light — holds the greatest honesty.

What I have learnt from shooting couples is that intimacy has to be authentic. Louie and Max, for example, stood in the half-light of a stained-glass window, idly showing each other their scars as I metered the light. I had only two frames left. One captured Max lifting his shirt to reveal the mark on his side. The other, both of them staring directly at me, but really, the image only works because they forgot about the camera, their connection more present than my lens.

Then, there was Clément and Quinton. The former had reached out to me for a coffee before inviting me to see his hometown, Dunkerque. Together with his friend Quinton (who he had met at a casting) we drove through the countryside. I asked them to pull over by a field and they lit a cigarette, a moment that captured the nuances of their friendship.

“I want a photograph to feel like a memory, even if it doesn’t belong to you.”

There was also Cooper and Indi, whose home, filled with patterned wallpaper, blankets and warm afternoon sun, set the stage for a simple embrace. And Sam and Asha, who I met after flying to his small hometown in Western Australia, we drove to a quarry and the couple sat on an old boat at sunset, kissing, while I stood far enough away to let the moment remain theirs.

These photographs have taught me that love is expansive — it is not only romantic, but platonic, familial, fleeting, everyday. None of this can happen without trust and surrender. My role is to capture what feels true, but also to show people how I see them. My hope is always to show the beauty in everything, especially in the ordinary moments that often go undocumented.

Behind the camera, I’ve learnt that love isn’t about being completed by another person. It is not something you search for to fill a gap. Love must begin with yourself — it should overflow, and when it does, the people around you will feel it and catch it. You can sense it when someone is secure in themselves: it’s in the way they hold space, the way they move, the way they look at someone they love.

Every day, through the faces I meet and the cities I travel to, I see it again and again: in the smallest gestures, in the laughter between takes, in the trust of strangers who welcome me into their worlds. And the camera has taught me — perhaps more than anything else — that once you find it inside yourself, you start to notice it everywhere.