Married Man

Married Man is Natasha Caruana's record of eighty dates she arranged with married men through websites built for people seeking affairs, each meeting documented on a disposable camera.

Between 2008 and 2009 Caruana met more than fifty men, some days three or four in a row, and instead of faces she photographed what was in front of her: a soiled coffee cup, a rain-soaked umbrella, hands signing a credit-card receipt or clasping hers across a table. The men rarely appear directly; the book reads through gesture and the debris of a staged date instead. Here Press published the book in an edition of 500, bound in faux black leather with a blind-embossed title, pairing the photographs with transcriptions of Caruana's conversations. Many of the men, she has said, were driven less by desire than by loneliness, and turned the dates into confession as often as flirtation.

Caruana, born in 1983 and based in London, works across photography, moving image, and installation on themes of love, betrayal, and fantasy. She holds an MA in Photography from the Royal College of Art and is a Senior Lecturer in Photography at the University for the Creative Arts, Farnham. The original photographs were also shown as part of "Invisible Adversaries" at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art in 2010.