These photos expose the ‘pain, fear and desire’ of relationships

Every family has their own lore. Even the dynamics in loving families can be fraught with complex tensions and laden with inherited resentments, only detectible to those on the inside. Photographer Ashley Markle has long used her camera as a way of laying bare and examining some of the complex history of her family and romantic relationships. “Photography is how I relate to the people around me,” the New York-based photographer tells Dazed. “It’s how I make sense of the world, and it gives my life a meaning that it didn’t have before I picked up a camera. 

Her new exhibition, Low Hanging Fruit, brings together four bodies of work, each focusing on a different significant relationship: an ex, her mum and stepfather, her husband, and her father. “The stories encompass my entire life,” she says. “The work looks at why I am the way I am, why my parents are the way they are and why those reasons affect how we interact with each other. My goal is to explore my own questions and raw emotions.”

The rupture in Markle’s relationship with her father, Bob, who was absent from her life from the age of ten to 22, marked a defining event in her story. It was a difficult reunion the artist explored in Do you know how beautiful you are?, a series of staged portraits, some of which are featured in her new exhibition, that attempt to reconstruct her relationship with Bob. Visiting his home in Warren, Ohio, she recreated unrealised scenes from an imagined past that might have been – the seminal moments of her childhood they had both missed out on. The pair are collaborating on a fantasy. In the process of attempting to make up for a past that never happened, they made something else happen. 

In many ways, the exhibition is also a study in presence and absence. These qualities are personified in the parental figures of her mum, dad, and stepfather who recur throughout. “I’m exploring how someone’s – my mum’s – presence forms a young self, as well as how someone’s absence – my father’s – can do the same in its own way,” she explains. “At the time I was making this work, my mother and father hadn’t spoken for around ten years. And even before that, my memories of their interactions consist of extremely brief handovers of me at roadside turnarounds.”

Markle herself exists in the project as the lynchpin of these relationships. Even though her parents didn’t speak to each other, they were still, in a sense, orbiting each other’s lives, bound together even in their hostility by their child. Markle is the epicentre. “It always felt like I was the only thing they had in common with each other,” she reflects. “But it also felt like I was the reason it didn’t work between them.”

Elsewhere, the exhibition delves into Markle’s romantic relationships, but these are also intertwined with her experience of her parents. “Having watched my mum go through the trials and tribulations of her dating life, much of what I  learned about love and sexuality came from her experiences. Because of this, her own sexuality will always be intertwined with mine,” she says.

Low Hanging Fruit contains many intimate and candid portraits of an ex-boyfriend as well as her now-husband. “The project with my ex is extremely physical in nature. Because our relationship was mostly about sex and control, the images exhibit pain, confusion, fear and desire,” she says. “The work with my husband portrays a much purer intimacy. It feels like we are children discovering each other and ourselves for the first time. Most images with the rest of my subjects exhibit distance, forced closeness, and walls; whereas the work with Nick, my husband, feels like I am pulling my subject closer and am unsure of this new territory but still giddy at the new feeling.”

Is it uncomfortable to display these intimacies in a public space? Markle may be sharing private moments and laying bare some difficult emotions, but she retains agency of her own mystery. Like some of the most intriguing art, it’s a delicate dance between exposure and concealment. “Even if it seems like I’m laying it all out there, I’m still in control of what gets shown. I still have my secrets and I hold them close to me.”

Low Hanging Fruit runs at Below Gallery from 11 July to 2 August 2026.