Mauro Barreto
Love Line
September 12 - October 25, 2025
215 N Limestone
Love Line, a collection of six portraits from Nashville-based photographer Mauro Barreto, explores the intangible emotional residue laced within the romance of youth. Set in unadorned, everyday environments, Barreto’s models are situated firmly in the confusing depths of longing. Not exactly posed, yet clearly aware of themselves as the object of the camera’s gaze, they inhabit zones of indistinction between profundity and frivolity, or serenity and angst.
Some of Barreto’s subjects stand with shoulders hunched, hands clasped, and gazes averted or unfocused, while others implicate the photographer and viewer more directly, staring back into the camera. The relationships between them are ambiguous but intense, suggesting unclear or unfulfilled expectations, without resolving into a clear narrative. At first glance, they depict self-assured embodiment, but the bodies collapse upon perception into the artifice of performance.
Looking upon these photos might make one think of their own youth (was it yesterday? last year? longer?) and remember the ache of potential which suffused even the most banal of moments. Potential which opened equally upon triumph and satisfaction as upon despair and loneliness. Some past has led to these moments, and some future awaits. But that’s hardly important now.