
The Kiss Book
- Publisher
- Baron Books
- Year
- 2025
- Specifications
- Hardback
30 x 23 cm
200 pages
Red page edges
Design by Charlie Twaddle and Samuel Burgess Johnson
A collaborative project by the musician Tove Lo and the photographer Kenny Laubbacher, spanning 15 countries and 18 cities and showing more than 600 subjects caught in the act of kissing. Made during Tove Lo's 2023 Dirt Femme tour with creative director Charlie Twaddle, it invited concertgoers to be photographed mid-kiss, and the participants' active involvement helps co-construct each picture. The images focus on faces, hands and tongues of couples, throuples and individuals with intertwined bodies, and were made soon after the world fully reopened, when kissing and dancing in sweaty crowds still felt surreal and a little forbidden. The book is designed to resemble a relic from a prohibition era when kissing was illegal, with red as the colour of flesh and red page edges recalling original sin. It opens a conversation about love and lust and about kissing as a form of connection beyond traditional sexual roles.