Loving: The Photo Book Built From a Century Of Photographs Showing 'The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name'

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Vintage collage of two black-and-white photos: two young men on a car; two men hold a sign reading NOT MARRIED BUT WILLING TO BE.

Somewhere in the mid-1990s, a couple in New York came across a photograph at a flea market. It showed two men in an embrace, one hugging the other from behind, easy and tender and completely unselfconscious. Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell bought it because it represented them. They took it home and put it on their desk. They assumed they'd never find another one like it.

Twenty-five years later, they had over 4,000.

The result is Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Love, 1850s-1950s, published in 2020 by 5 Continents Editions. It's a collection of vernacular photographs, meaning everyday snapshots rather than professional portraits, showing men in romantic settings across a full century of history. Kissing, holding each other, sitting in each other's laps, posing with arms around shoulders in ways that leave very little room for ambiguity. The photographs came from flea markets, shoe boxes, old suitcases, family archives, and eventually online auctions. They're from Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Russia, the United States, and a dozen other countries. And almost every single person in them is completely anonymous.

How You Build a Collection Like This

Nini and Treadwell kept their collection almost entirely private for years. They didn't think anyone else would be interested. When they finally began sharing it, the response caught them off guard. People wept. The images resonated across ages, genders, orientations, and political backgrounds in a way the collectors hadn't anticipated.

Part of what makes the collection so striking is the method Nini and Treadwell developed for deciding which photographs belonged in it. They were well aware that men photographed together in friendly poses was historically common and not automatically romantic. Victorian and Edwardian men were comfortable with physical closeness in ways that read differently today. So the collectors set their own criteria. They looked at the eyes. Their rule was simple: there's a look two people have when they're in love that can't be manufactured and can't be hidden. If they saw it, the photo was in.

The photographs span formats that trace the entire history of the medium: daguerreotypes, tintypes, ambrotypes, silver gelatin prints, and amateur snapshots. Some are formal studio portraits. Others are obviously candid. One shows two men holding a printed sign that reads "Not Married But Willing to Be." The range of context is part of what makes the book so convincing. These aren't outliers or eccentrics. They're farmers, soldiers, businessmen, students, working-class men and middle-class men and men in uniforms, photographed across an entire century on multiple continents.

Photographed When It Was Illegal

The photographs in Loving were taken during a period when same-sex relationships were not just socially stigmatised but in many places criminal. In Britain, male homosexuality remained illegal until 1967. In the United States, sodomy laws persisted in some states until 2003. These photographs predate Stonewall, predate any organised rights movement, predate almost any public acknowledgment that queer love existed at all.

And yet here they are. Men arranging themselves in front of cameras, in studios and on picnics and at beaches and in bedrooms, to document something they weren't supposed to feel. The act of taking the photograph was, in its quiet way, an act of defiance. Nobody who had this picture taken thought it was going to end up in a book a hundred years later. They did it because they wanted proof, for themselves or for each other, that what they had was real.

Most of the images were found discarded. No names. No dates. No locations. No story attached. The people in them are gone, and their photographs were separated from whatever context they once had, which is how they ended up in flea market bins and online auction listings. The anonymity gives the book an ache that runs alongside its warmth. These were real people. We'll never know who they were.

A Book That Became an Exhibition and Then a Sequel

Loving was published in October 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, and found its audience anyway. The response was wide enough that in 2023, a selection of 400 photographs from the Nini-Treadwell Collection was exhibited at the Musee Rath in Geneva, Switzerland, under the title Loving: The Exhibition. A second volume, Loving II: More Photographic History of Men in Love, 1850s-1950s, followed, drawing from the same collection of over 4,000 photographs and presenting images that didn't make the first book.

The project has also attracted academic interest. The Nini-Treadwell Collection is now studied not just as queer history but as vernacular photography history. The technical range alone, from mid-nineteenth century daguerreotypes through to mid-twentieth century snapshots, makes it a significant archive of how photography evolved as a popular medium. The subjects just happen to also be quietly rewriting what we thought we knew about how men in love behaved when nobody was watching.

Why Loving Matters Beyond the History

There's a particular kind of historical erasure that doesn't come from burning records or rewriting textbooks. It comes from simply not preserving ordinary life. The grand archive of Victorian and Edwardian social history contains enormous amounts of detail about how people dressed, worked, travelled, and worshipped. It contains almost nothing about how queer people loved, because nobody was recording it officially and most of what was recorded privately got lost or destroyed.

What Nini and Treadwell have assembled, photograph by photograph over a quarter century, is exactly that missing record. Not polished or curated or presented through any particular agenda, just ordinary people caught being in love. The book doesn't argue a thesis. It doesn't need to. The faces do the work.

Via: The Guardian

Buy: In Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Love 1850s–1950. Pictures via the Nini-Treadwell Collection.