On an ordinary Sunday 20 years ago, Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell went to a local antique mall they’d been to many times before. While browsing, Treadwell spotted a box filled with old photographs and, as he flipped through, he found a snapshot of two men in a romantic embrace, dated 1927. “At the time we were both shocked that the photo was ever taken,” says Nini, a former ballet academy director, “much less survived 73 years to end up in our hands, in Dallas, Texas.” The couple thought they’d never find another antique photo of men in love.

And then they did, almost a year later. “When we found the first, we had no expectation there would ever be a second,” Nini says. They have since found photographs of male couples in formats dating to the beginning of the medium—daguerreotypes, glass negatives, cabinet cards, tintypes and photo booth snapshots—at flea markets, estate sales and online marketplaces, all taken during an era when same-sex marriage was illegal. It was only when they had amassed around 300 photographs that Nini and Treadwell realised it was a collection. It now numbers more than 4,000 vernacular photos dating from between the 1850s and 1950s, sourced from 36 different countries.

The exhibition Loving: They Love Each Other(until 24 September) at the Musée d’art et d’histoire (MAH) in Geneva, Switzerland, publicly debuts a selection of 400 images from their trove. Inspired by the book about their collection published in 2020 (Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Love 1850-1950, Five Continents Editions), the exhibition contains almost every photograph from the book plus 80 that Nini and Treadwell collected after its release.

“In these pictures it’s fantastic the number of different stories it could activate,” says MAH director Marc-Olivier Wahler of Loving as a whole, and also a 1951 photograph of two soldiers sitting on a bench. “You wonder, they’re in the army and are they really together? Then suddenly you see the entangled feet. And all these possible stories—what happened to them, what happened to this photograph? Where was it found? It’s endless.”

Loving also includes newly commissioned artwork by Swiss photographer Walter Pfeiffer, known for his playfully erotic portraits of male models. Pfeiffer chose snapshots from Nini and Treadwell’s collection and then colorised and enlarged them, layering a contemporary filter on the vintage images. Two rare black-and-white videos by conceptual artist Urs Lüthi will also be screened together with the exhibition.

In contrast to these two established Swiss artists, most of the photographers and sitters in the photographs are anonymous. An outlier is an early 20th century portrait that may be of Bloomsbury circle artist Duncan Grant and poet Rupert Brooke. Otherwise, the men in the photographs are unnamed.

Apart from some photo booth snapshots (generated by a machine) and an early selfie of a couple in a mirror, the authors of the images are also unknown. With many of the photographs in the collection taken at a time before at-home cameras were readily available, the understanding is that couples used photographers who they felt comfortable approaching to help produce visual testimony of their loving relationships. Few 19th-century photographers are known to have taken portraits of same-sex couples, with New York-based Alice Austen being one of them. This collection proves there were many uncredited others.

As private collectors, Nini and Treadwell had the freedom to preserve something outside of the institutional mainstream and inspire new research. “We felt [it] was our obligation to keep these photographs. To keep them safe,” says Treadwell, who works in the cosmetics industry. “Our goal is to continue to have museum exhibitions wherever we can that will propel us into telling this story and sharing the history that love is love. Love has been around forever.”

• Loving: They Love Each Other, until 24 September, Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva, Switzerland

Regeneration; Landscape, Waterscapes, and Flora winner

Many forests in Jasper National Park in Alberta, Canada, benefit from naturally occurring, low-intensity wildfires. Without fire, trees grow unnaturally dense, and dead logs accumulate on the forest floor. This timber can collide with hotter, drier conditions and cause explosively large wildfires. Now forest managers are trying to reverse a century of misguided management by igniting controlled burns. The landscape may look different, but as this haunting image of a burned spruce forest shows, they can be equally captivating.

Photograph: Miquel Angel ArtusIllana/BigPicture

… life is filled with opportunities and choices … sometimes you get it right and sometimes not so much. Spent most of the day catching with friends I have not talked to in a while and near the end of day I headed up to the Rainbow Trout Farm in the canyon … a very quiet place at end of day and important to a few herons and hawks that grab a meal there.

Above is a great blue heron who scored a fine meal and below one that didn’t … kinda like us when we go fishing, but for us survival is usually not what is at stake!

End of the week for me … have a beautiful day and weekend. The plan is to be back Monday morning having had more days filled with beauty and joy … always a choice how we experience each day!

Smiles,

Ted

Filled with dreams and songs and love, I wander
afield.

Meditation, softened by the peaceful lands of grain and
the illimitable blue sea overhead, draws my heart to
my lips as one whose talent is in song.

I yield to the thousand felicities of this transport, like a
child led by his father’s hand; and no questions darken
this day of my content.

Afield by Max Ehrmann

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The easiest way to reach Mr. Grussing is by email: ted@tedgrussing.com

In addition to sales of photographs already taken Ted does special shoots for patrons on request and also does air-to-air photography for those who want photographs of their airplanes in flight. All special photographic sessions are billed on an hourly basis.

Ted also does one-on-one workshops for those interested in learning the techniques he uses.  By special arrangement Ted will do one-on-one aerial photography workshops which will include actual photo sessions in the air.

More about Ted Grussing …

In sun-dappled scenes shot across the German countryside, boys and girls in navy Scout uniforms hike through the woods, pitch tents and lay on the grass under open skies. They wear striped kerchiefs and frayed patches of their national flag. In quiet moments, girls clasp hands and recline against one another; one Scout erupts in laughter as she holds another’s foot to be mercilessly tickled.

Taken by the German photographer Stephan Lucka, the images, “Das Gefühl, das nur wir kennen,” or “The feeling, that only we know,” are saturated in coming-of-age nostalgia for anyone who relished in a sense of freedom in the outdoors.

For Lucka, who was first a Scout in the 1990s in Bad Salzuflen, a town in Western Germany, and later a troop leader there, the project served as both a homecoming and a way to better understand those formative years. Having photographed Scout groups around the country beginning in 2015, he published the series as a book late in 2022.

“Sometimes with life you can only understand it backwards,” Lucka said in a video interview. “In a simple way, I wanted to return to that time that was part of my youth… and try to understand what this time meant to me.”

“I realized that (Scouting) shaped me in an important way,” he added.

Nature and nurture

Though Lucka said some aspects of Scouting have adapted to new technology since he was young — today, troops shoot social media content and use Slack to organize themselves, for example — he found the reasons why young people join are largely the same: to foster “this feeling of connection” to others and to nature, as he described it.

“With the Scouts I am more on my own, I have to be more independent… but I also feel part of something big,” said 13-year-old Jette, whose Scout nickname is Tonks, in a translated interview from the book. “The fact that you are independent but also part of a community at the same time is somehow paradoxical to me… It is a feeling of freedom and belonging in equal measure.”

One of Lucka’s favorite images is one of the earliest he took, of two teenage girls laying entwined on a purple mat on the grass while out camping in the woods, eyes closed and hair fanning out beside them.

“It was just one exposure, and then I went away because I didn’t want to disturb them,” Lucka recalled. “But to me, there’s this intimacy that always resonated.”

Wandering the path

In Germany, the Scouting movement took off in 1909, a year after the publication of British Army officer Robert Baden-Powell’s book “Scouting for Boys,” which is the framework for the organization (now present in 216 countries). But at that time, the country’s youth were already experiencing a revolution that brought them into nature. The movement, called Wandervogel, or “wandering bird,” began in Berlin, and saw children and teens rebel against industrialization by hiking and adventuring in groups, rejecting city lifestyles and materialism. Under Nazi Germany, Wandervogel and Scouting groups were banned; Scouting returned to West Germany following the war, but not to East Germany until 1990 when the country was reunified.

In German, scouts are called “pfadfinder,” meaning “pathfinder,” which Lucka pointed out as he recalled an anxiety-inducing time when, as a troop leader, he nearly couldn’t find the way back to camp for his group.

“I got lost — I had a map and a compass, but I couldn’t actually identify where I was,” he said with a laugh. “It was kind of strange situation.”

How did he get back on track? Thanks to Scouts guidance that had been ingrained in him when he was young: Seek higher ground for a better perspective. So he climbed a tree, identified a point that was recognizable, and led his troop there using his compass.

“I found the Scout solution: When you get lost, try to get a better view,” he paused. “And this is a bit metaphoric for life.”

Today, Scouting in Germany emphasizes hiking, camping and practical skills, as well as the creative arts, Lucka said. He also credits the community with helping him to develop social skills and gain confidence in himself. At the end of his book, he rewinds time with a collection of personal snaps from his Scouting days: a portrait of a young Lucka with sunglasses and long, curly hair on a night he remembers falling in love; another of his troop on a bus trip from France, triumphantly holding a baguette. Ultimately, he thinks “Das Gefühl, das nur wir kennen” is “a story about freedom,” but also one of acceptance, showing a community where many have found a “safe space” to be themselves.

In its cultivation of this environment, and kinship, “The Scouts (could be) a model for how to treat each other in a decent way,” he added.

“Das Gefühl, das nur wir kennen” is available now.