They Don’t Love You like I Love You: Commentary on Domino Leaha’s Unfulfilled (2025)
NHT2205 Brevity of Love: (Short) Storytelling AY2025/26 Semester 2
Ram Shekar
Presentation Flow
Domino Leaha’s Unfulfilled initially presents the photographic image of the lover as a record of intimacy but ultimately reveals itself to function as a Lacanian screen (an image that substitutes for an unstable object of desire).
This gap is further intensified by photography’s reproducibility (Benjamin) which detaches the lover’s image from the relationship it once seemed to capture.
I
Thesis
Domino Leaha is an Italian-born photographer and splits her time between London, New York and Los Angeles.
Domino Leaha
“I strive to evoke a visceral experience for the viewer. I invite them into a private world; one of raw intensity and honest emotion” - Leaha for Lampoon Online
“My relationship with photography is a love affair. I create intimacy with my subjects as I become one with them. I capture their essence and their vulnerability in the moment. I gravitate toward details and imperfections”.
Unfulfilled (2025) by Domino Leaha
Collection of intimate portraits spanning just over a decade from 2013-2024.
Domino’s body of work is paired with writings and poems by the photographer’s subjects and collaborators which allows us to peek into the private lives of the artist’s closest friends, muses and lovers.
The photographic portraits are deeply sensual. In their raw intensity, they capture the subjects’ vulnerabilities and spirit.
Leaha’s sensibility towards colour, light, and shadow allows her to present the photographs to the viewer as not just portraits but emotional and visceral landscapes.
Unfulfilled (2025) by Domino Leaha
Falling in (Love) & Falling Apart
“I photographed the people that I love the most. Some of them I’m still in touch with, others were ex-lovers, and a few of them are old friends that I don’t speak to anymore”
“I was broken-hearted by a boyfriend at the time. When I looked at the Shakespeare sonnets I was obsessed with, the word ‘unfulfilled’ stood out to me. I realised it captured exactly what I was feeling – a sense of wanting, of requiring more than could be returned.”
The project reads like a diary where Leaha was drawn to simply capturing what surrounded her at different moments in time.
Lacanian Screen
“All the people in the book are broken”
“And I was broken too” - Leaha
While Leaha’s photographs present the lover as a fully present subject, this intensity of intimacy can be read through Lacan as a screen that produces an ‘illusion’ of total access.
Lacanian Screen
Leaha’s photographs, I argue, tries to resist the idea of the lover as a distance or abstract object – but an embodied subject.
However, Lacan would suggest that this sense of immediacy is not a recovery of the ‘real’ but the effect of a ‘screen’.
The image feels total but that feeling is the illusion.
Walter Benjamin: Photography’s Reproducibility
Aura = The unique presence of an artwork: “the work is ‘there all at once’, drawing space-time around it into a concentrated moment with a sense of ‘inaccessible mystery’.
Authenticity is crucial to how aura is preserved and how its presence is felt.
The act of reproducing multiple copies of an artwork becomes an act that removes the aura from the works.
Benjamin argues that photography allows images to be reproduced endlessly, become detached from their original context and circulate to audience far removed from the moment of capture.
Walter Benjamin: Photography’s Reproducibility
Leaha’s photographs originate from deeply personal, intimate relationships. At first glance, they seem to preserve that intimacy.
But through Benjamin, the moment these images are published, reproduced and viewed by strangers, they are detached from the original relationship that gave them meaning.
If Lacan suggests that love is already mediated through an image, Benjamin further shows that photography externalises and multiplies that image to allow it to exist and be consumed outside the intimacy it once seemed to capture.
Snapshots of Love Lost & Found
Thank You