Intimacy is a key social goal and the fundamental basis of close social relationships. Current social relationships and the interactions through which they are created and maintained are highly visualised. This visualisation also transforms the way that intimacy is played out. Based on an interdisciplinary literature review, this paper focuses on the concepts of intimacy and visual intimacy, and maps the different roles that visuals can play in intimacy practices. It shows that the content of visuals is not always essential for creating and maintaining intimacy. Practices relating to producing, sharing, and talking about pictures, as well as practices of seeing, also need to be taken into account when discussing the overall concept of visualintimacy.

The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has had manifold societal implications. This paper reflects on the role of visual communication for maintaining relationship stability in couple relationships during the first wave of the pandemic, which we understand as a circumstantial turning point. The analysis is based on qualitative interviews with couples before, during, and after the first wave of COVID-19 in Switzerland, complemented by creative visual methods, follow-up surveys, and video calls. Our results show that visual practices are embedded in rather stable communication repertoires of couples during their relationship maintenance phase. Our study also points to the simultaneous use of a variety of visual practices, which led to a high “visual saturation”. These visual practices were found to contribute to relationship stability by reinforcing intimacy, a key factor in couple relationships, thereby shielding the relationships from circumstantial change.