![handsome gay men in love handsome gay men in love](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/34/5a/fb/345afbff35a3f76813033ecf5e49f874.jpg)
The sweetness of the images is palpable, and may even startle in their brazenness, such as the photo of the men holding a preprinted sign that reads: “Not Married But Willing to Be.” Yet, when thumbing through the book, you may scoff and think: Maybe it’s just guys horsing around (despite the kissing and legs wrapped around in intimate bedroom or picnic scenes) or that we’re unfairly placing our contemporary notions upon innocent, youthful friendships. Soon they began actively looking for these photos that spoke to them and felt they were on “some kind of rescue mission.” They’ve accumulated more than 3,000 photographs that they found in shoe boxes, estate sales, family archives, flea markets, and online auctions, and the collection includes daguerreotypes, glass negatives, tin types, photo postcards, and simple snapshots from all over the world: Australia, France, Germany, Japan, Latvia, and the United States (with a considerable amount sourced from Bulgaria). Taking such a photo, during a time when they would have been less understood than they would today, was not without risk.” … The open expression of the love that they shared also revealed a moment of determination. The couple explain in the book’s foreword that they began collecting over 20 years ago, when they discovered a vintage photo dating from somewhere around the 1920s in an antique shop in Dallas, that they thought was “one of a kind.” As they write: “These two men, in front of a house, were embracing and looking at one another in a way that only two people in love would do. The book, subtitled A Photographic History of Men in Love, is a visual narrative that reveals tender moments between men - 19th-century working-class guys, fashionably dressed businessmen, university students, soldiers, sailors, and many more - through benign, vernacular portraiture. But I was reminded of this impulse and drive to collect obscure photos when I flipped through the pages of Loving, a gorgeous new monograph composed of hundreds of photos of men from the 1850s to 1950s amassed by Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell. Or why it continues to hold us spellbound.
![handsome gay men in love handsome gay men in love](https://cdn.superstock.com/6036/Comp/6036-18015573.jpg)
Now that we are bombarded by billions of images and everyone is a wanna-be avant-garde pocket picture maker, it’s easy for us to forget that until very recently photography was rejected as something with lesser aesthetic value.