LOVING: A Photographic History of Men in Love, 1850s–1950s draws on Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell’s collection of more than 2,700 photographs made across a century of changing social and visual conditions. Published by 5 Continents Editions in 2020, the book presents romantic relationships between men in domestic interiors, military settings, parks, beaches, and other everyday environments. Its subject is intimate, but its historical range is expansive: the images record how affection could be pictured, concealed, or entrusted to the camera when public acknowledgement was often difficult or forbidden.
The collection began accidentally, with photographs found at flea markets, and was developed over more than twenty years by Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell, a Texan couple living in New York. Their collecting practice gives the book an unusual archival character. These are not the products of a single photographic author or a unified period style, but vernacular images gathered across several countries, including the United States, Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Greece, Japan, Latvia, the United Kingdom, and Russia. Couples are frequently shown alone, while other figures sometimes appear as discreet witnesses to the scene.
Paolo Maria Noseda introduces the photographic narrative, alongside a text by Nini and Treadwell. The result is a collaboration between collection, editorial framing, and historical attention rather than a conventional monographic photobook. Chronology matters: clothing, hairstyles, automobiles, photographic conventions, and changing social codes quietly mark the passage from the nineteenth into the twentieth century. Yet the book’s deepest continuity lies in gesture and proximity—the embrace, the shared gaze, the deliberate act of being photographed.
For collectors, LOVING deserves attention as both a substantial vernacular archive and a carefully shaped account of male intimacy. Its 336 pages and more than 300 reproduced images allow private evidence to accumulate into a broader history, without reducing these photographs to mere curiosities. The book preserves moments in which tenderness found a form, even under conditions of secrecy and constraint.
