All of us have an intense need to be loved and nurtured. Love, as John Bowlby’s and others’ experiments have shown, could be considered one of our most basic and fundamental human needs. One of the forms that the need to be loved takes, is contact comfort, the desire to be held and touched. Research has proven that babies who are deprived from contact comfort, particularly during the first six months after they are born, grow up to be psychologically damaged. The primary caregiver acts as a prototype for future relationships and has three main implications: others as being trustworthy, the self being valuable, and the self as being effective when interacting with others.
Love and other affections are forms of social relations and the result of historical processes, of which Nietzsche would call "genealogy". Due to its particular intensity, love acquires a dimension of identity: we are what we love. There is a double movement of loving and being loved, which is very important in making us define who we are, and making us feel life as something worth living.
Although the canonical place for love to be practiced would be the family and the so-called "maternal love", society has gone through multiple transformations over time. These changes have implications on the way love is expressed, but haven’t changed the need for love, on a basic, essential level. By assuming the importance of love in our lives, we’d like also, on the other side of the spectrum, reflect on the ramifications of the deprivation of this fundamental human need and the consequences of it in many areas of our lives, privately and collectively.
Topics may include stories tackling the theme of self-love, work and relationships with peers, use and abuse of technology, parental love, friendships, interpretation of what happens politically and socially related to love, closure and fear towards the ‘different’, and so on.
The meaning of ‘tender’ in this call, refers in general to the condition of being vulnerable. So, if love really drives many decisions and affects deeply our lives, either from a personal or a social and collective standpoint, ours would like to be an invite to take care of the unprotected and fragile, physically or emotionally, which need protection, attention and affection, as a way to generate circular love.
love me tender is a call to action to take good care for others. We are looking for powerful visual stories that can help us reflect on the application of the universal basic need for love, in the context of the fast transforming society.
What winners receiveInclusion in the global tour as multimedia screenings (the list is work-in-progress):
- DOCfield Barcelona, Spain, 5th December 2018 in the prestigious Palau Robert
- Projections in photography festivals in Latin America
- Lagos Festival, Nigeria, October 2019
Leica Fotografie International will loan to two of the selected authors equipment in the form of camera, lenses and accessories. The period of this loan would be one to two months to realize a project chosen by the photographer. The equipment will be insured during the period of loan with a loan contract. The work produced with these cameras has the opportunity if suitable, to be published in one of the LFI channels.
Each of the selected authors will receive a symbolic fee for the image usage (50€ per author screened), kindly offered by DOCfield Barcelona.
YET Magazine, as media partner, will publish an article featuring the 10 projects selected.
Rvm Magazine, as media partner, will publish on its blog, Shots&Murmurs one of the projects selected by the RVM team as interview.
Event informations
Slideluck Editorial, with the support of international partners, is thrilled to launch the second biennial global call on the theme: love me tender. If love really drives many decisions and affects deeply our lives, either from a personal or a social and collective standpoint, our call would like to be an invite to take care of the unprotected and ‘tender’, as a way to generate circular love.
SLIDELUCK EDITORIAL is an online platform for contemporary photography & multimedia, born in 2015 as a spin-off of the Slideluck global platform.
We launch biennial open calls and worldwide tours tackling important social and cultural topics; previous call was BORN THE SAME. Our aim is also to take photography and multimedia to people, promoting the positive social impact contemporary photography can have, through global tours and screenings in public spaces.