Inside Bill Hart-French’s Photobook “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore”

Bill Hart-French’s debut photobook is less about bodies and more about the voids they leave behind. “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore” isn’t simply a photo collection; it’s a requiem staged in bedrooms, bathrooms, and the quiet theater of intimacy’s aftermath.

Collaborating with Catarina Correia, a former Playboy model whose presence unspools between vulnerability and provocation, Hart-French builds a narrative that feels both painfully private and relentlessly cinematic.

The work bears the fingerprints of its influences. You sense Saul Leiter’s hushed voyeurism in the way light licks across skin and furniture, and you catch Corrine Day’s raw diaristic edge in the unpolished domestic backdrops, an unmade bed, a cluttered sink, the soft violence of daylight exposing too much. This is the intimacy of people who no longer belong to each other.

What makes the book unsettlingly addictive is its refusal to glamourize. These aren’t erotic pictures in the conventional sense. They’re snapshots of exhaustion, of someone stretching their spine against the weight of yesterday, of a body suspended in the awkward geography of leaving. The flesh here is not offered; it’s revealed, almost unwillingly, like a diary page torn out and left on the floor.

There’s music behind it, too. Hart-French confesses his obsession with The Walker Brothers, and you can almost hear the mournful echo of “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore” dragging itself through the frames. The photographs breathe like a lost Sixties ballad, melancholic, romantic, but with the sting of inevitability baked in.

Hart-French has said, “I love to tell stories.” This book proves it. He tells them with bodies instead of words, with shadows instead of sentences. It’s not about Catarina Correia being a model or a muse; it’s about the way her presence anchors and dissolves at once, an avatar of love already gone.

In an age where photography drowns in polished surfaces and digital sterility, Hart-French’s first book feels defiantly human. Imperfect, intimate, bruised. Like the song, it lingers with the aftertaste of something you’ve already lost.