One day in 2018, photographer Tom “TBow” Bowden was walking around one of his favourite places in the world to take photographs, New Orleans, Louisiana, when he came across two wanderers who immediately caught his eye. Lugging their lives on their backs in large camping rucksacks, with their hair knotted and locked having not showered for weeks, were Kat and Freddie, a married couple who spent their days hopping trains, hitchhiking and travelling around the USA. Noticing the glint in their eyes, TBow walked over to ask if he could take their picture. They agreed, and the subjects and photographer soon found themselves in conversation.
“I do talk to people if there’s time,” explains TBow. “I want to know what makes them happy, what hurts, and what is going well.” The couple explained that they’d first met in New Orleans, and each year they would hop the trains back to where it all began and renew their wedding vows. “They were such a wonderful story,” he says. “They were so sweet together — and very picturesque, with the tattoos. You could tell they were actually riding the rails.”
The portrait of them he took that day — with the couple’s love for each other fully on show — is now presented as part of TBow’s new series So Happy Together, which collates a selection of photographs he’s taken of couples from the past decade.
But Freddie and Kat’s happiness wouldn’t endure. Just a year later TBow returned to New Orleans, and right where the pair should have been renewing their wedding vows, he found a seemingly drunk Freddie wandering solo, with a weight on his shoulders heavier than the contents of his rucksack. “Where’s Kat?” TBow asked. “TBow,” Freddie replied. “A drunken rage ended it all.”
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That encounter spoke to TBow, as someone who himself has been married and divorced twice. “They were fine, they were great, they were so in love,” TBow says. “With couples, it will seem like everything’s good, everything’s going well. Then it doesn’t go well — and that’s been my life experience.”
In So Happy Together, the photographer explores the complexities of being in a relationship — partners viewed through a sceptical, yet celebratory lens. “I’d have to say you wouldn’t want me taking your marriage photograph,” he says wryly. “I guess I’ve always been part of the couple that failed to stay coupled.”
From Hollywood and television providing an endless well of happy-ending romcoms, to “death do us apart” wedding vows, much of the Western world’s expectations of love are built around the monogamously romantic. The project name itself was drawn from a 1967 classic by The Turtles, which TBow clears his through and sings down the phone: “I remember me and you, and you and me / No matter how they toss the dice, it had to be / the only one for me is you, and you is me / so happy together.”
But often these romantic expectations fail us. In the UK, the government’s Office for National Statistics found that of couples who married in 1996, 41 per cent of the marriages had ended in divorce by their 25th anniversary. In the USA it’s a similar story, with the World Population Review estimating the rate to be between 35 per cent and 50 per cent. “I’m not good at coupling, I didn’t do well with that part in my life,” says TBow, with a sigh. “But I know based on my experience — and you can call me a glass half empty kind of guy — that these couples that are smiling on the street will not be smiling for long.”
With his up-and-personal portraits, TBow offers a glimpse at the dynamics of each relationship — through facial expressions, body language and even what they wear in relation to one another. From couples with age gaps, to queer couples sporting perfectly matching outfits, to newly-wedded spouses in a New York Subway — the pictures are packed with hints to how their lives look behind-closed-doors. “I’m alone with my couples. I photograph them and then I look for clues about them,” he says. “Why are they together? What do they love? What hurts them? And some of the clues are in the things that they are holding or wearing.”
Despite his previous marriages not working out, and the cynical eye he views his subjects with, TBow still loves love. “I guess I’m a realist, but I have loved and I’ve been in love and that’s important,” he says. “I found ‘the one’ twice in my life and I’m very blessed that I did — it’s a wonderful experience. What a sad, lonely place the world would be if people didn’t fall in love.”
Now retired from his day job and spending most of his days wandering the streets of the USA taking photographs, TBow’s found peace in solitude and his camera. “I’m a little older now, so I don’t yearn for love,” he says. “We form couples first to have sex then later to have children; the people who study this say we couple up once more for companionship. Well, I don’t need companionship — I think the people I photograph are my friends. I often find myself conversing with a street portrait on the computer,” he continues. “I work alone so that I can study people who choose not to be alone.”
‘So Happy Together’ and other street photography from TBow Bowden can be found on his website and Instagram.
Credits
All images ©️ T. Bowden Productions, Inc.