Love Story, published by Hoxton Mini Press in 2023, is an anthology edited by Rachel Segal Hamilton, who also writes its accompanying text. Its subtitle states the territory plainly: new photography of love and intimacy. The difficulty lies in the subject itself. Love resists the camera; it appears in gesture, routine and patience rather than in one decisive frame. Hamilton’s response is to withhold the single authorial voice and let a crowd of photographers speak at once.

More than twenty contributors are gathered here, and they do not agree on what a love story is. Partners and spouses appear, but so do friends, siblings, parents and children, and the wider communities people assemble around themselves. First romance sits beside long marriage; passion beside care and forbearance. These photographs quietly dispute the notion that intimacy belongs only to couples, and they treat tenderness as something observable rather than merely felt.

The editing tilts toward contemporary practice, drawing on recent and formally experimental projects from photographers both widely exhibited and barely known. The sequence is arranged rather than chronological, and the book’s scale supports it: a hardcover of 224 pages, 207 by 162 millimetres, closer in proportion to a novel than to an exhibition catalogue. That modesty is a decision, not a limitation.

For a collector, the case for Love Story rests on structure rather than rarity. Anthologies of this kind often settle into surveys; this one is edited, and the writing frames the pictures instead of decorating them. Read as a whole, it becomes a group portrait of how photography currently approaches closeness — across generations, genders and kinds of kinship — and a compact record of a subject the medium has always found awkward.