Peter Pfrunder, Iwan Schumacher: Couples

Collected photographs of pairs of people oblivious to the camera, from unknown strangers to Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller

In 2015, Swiss filmmaker Iwan Schumacher (born 1947) began collecting candid photographs of pairs of people who appear oblivious to the camera, either because they're on familiar terms with the photographer or because they don't realize they're being observed. Together with Peter Pfrunder, director of the Swiss Foundation for Photography, Schumacher synthesized his collection into book form. Whether friends, lovers, partners, family members or complete strangers, the duos portrayed in Couples fall across a range of ages, power dynamics and gender combinations. Although it displays a wide spectrum of human emotions, the book does not claim to show a photo-historically representative selection of people from all walks of life. It is, instead, an eclectic assortment of analog and digital stills spliced together to form a new multithreaded mosaic film.