LOVING II, published by 5 Continents Editions in 2025, extends a photographic history of men in love from the 1850s through the 1950s. Its images come from the vernacular archive assembled by Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell, who began collecting more than twenty-five years ago and have expanded it to over 4,000 photographs. This volume presents an entirely new selection drawn from images acquired since 2019, continuing the work begun in the first LOVING while allowing the archive’s breadth and emotional range to emerge afresh.
The book’s subject is intimate, but its historical reach is wide. Couples appear in daguerreotypes, tintypes, ambrotypes, silver gelatin prints, snapshots, and other photographic forms, creating a capsule history of changing photographic technologies across a century. The men represented come from varied circumstances—soldiers, farmers, students, and people both affluent and poor; the young and the old. Their gestures range from direct embraces to furtive touches, and the pictures often hold private feeling within the conventions of public portraiture.
That tension gives LOVING II its distinctive force. These are not images commissioned to illustrate a later history of queer life, but photographs made within the periods they record, preserving moments in which affection could be openly staged, cautiously signalled, or simply shared between two people. Each picture is, in the book’s conception, a story of two told in an instant. Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell provide the texts, while Laura Leonelli contributes an essay placing the archive within a broader photographic and historical frame.
For collectors, the volume merits attention as both a continuation and an expansion: a substantial, 336-page hardcover record of an evolving archive, issued in English by 5 Continents Editions. Its importance lies less in a single iconic image than in the cumulative evidence of ordinary tenderness across regions, classes, ages, and photographic processes. LOVING II asks to be read slowly, as a carefully gathered counter-history in which the persistence of love is registered through the fragile authority of vernacular photographs.
