Twenty years ago, Neal Treadwell and Hugh Nini were in an antique store in Dallas, browsing through boxes of old photographs. One in particular caught their eye. It showed two men in a passionate embrace. The date was 1927. After that, they kept their eyes open for more such pictures, which they figured would be almost impossible to find. And yet their archive grew. A photo from 1880, for instance, sees one man sitting in another man’s lap. A shot of two Black soldiers in 1951 shows one man seated snugly behind the other. This exhibition, which displays 400 photographs from Treadwell and Nini’s collection, looks at images of love between men that date from 1850 to 1950, a time when these relationships were illegal. —Elena Clavarino