PLAYING AND REALITY

vement of the film, it makes us as viewers slow down and take note. Suddenly details and recurrent motifs that would have
been background information in moving image become visual statements and gain greater significance.
For love is… Major introduced even more risk in her working process, as she handed it over to an anonymous public. Would
anyone respond to her freepost postcard? Would their replies be interesting or banal? Could she trust others? Over 7000
postcards were hand delivered to people’s letterboxes across London and the West Midlands over two years. 451 were
returned. The resulting project love is… proves to be testimony to the kindness and openness of some strangers and the
open hostility provoked in others, with statements such as “seems like a self-centred ego trip”, “give up” or “you need to
get a life mate”. It is interesting that even those annoyed by the request still felt compelled to participate and have become
part of the project.
In the work Major had set out realistic parameters. The participants could remain anonymous, though some chose not to,
and many felt able to be candid and respond in the moment, perhaps caught off guard by the request. Coming together as
a body of work it speaks of so much. Some responses to the question love is…
8
Carrying on without them
Infinite
The whole point
Bloody hard to find – got a map?
An evolutionary oddity
Everything
A bit of a bastard
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Part of the impact of the work, lost here but present in reproductions of it, is that the words are handwritten, and in many
cases hand drawn, including personal annotations and illustrations. Letters and postcards are becoming antiquated anachronisms
in our current culture. The British postal service delivers significantly fewer letters since email was developed.
Today they mainly deliver parcels for internet shopping. Something significant may have been lost here when we consider
how often we mediate our social memories and histories through first hand written accounts. Will those be replaced by
blogs and Facebook pages in future? How will that alter what is said? We reveal much more visually today in our digital
age but seem to say so much less in terms of communication.
The stills taken from the film Last Tango in Paris were the images shown on the front of each postcard. A film about love