The Pleasure of His Company: Male Togetherness in Found Photographs: Vintage Photographs from the Collection of John Ibson

What makes The Pleasure of His Company especially valuable is its warmth. It does not lecture the viewer. It asks us to notice. It asks us to look carefully at the small freedoms preserved in these images and to consider what has been gained, lost or misunderstood in the history of male friendship.-Art Daily News (June 28, 2026)A photo may capture a moment in cultural time―literally mirroring beliefs, assumptions, conventions, and notions of behaviors acceptable and scorned. The 385 photographs in this book are just such mirrors. Two decades ago, John Ibson, a historian of masculinity’s history in the United States and of the variety of male relationships, used that approach to photography to examine shifting meanings of American manhood in his influential book Picturing Men: A Century of Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography.Now, in The Pleasure of His Company, John Ibson opens his vast collection of everyday photographs of males together once again. Ibson believes these photos, all published here for the first time, take us to a world of unselfconscious affection among American men, a world largely lost today. It is a world, he maintains, whose loss contributed to the toxic masculinity so much lamented today.Affection abounds in these photographs, yet Ibson believes it is impossible to know for certain whether most of the males pictured were sexually attracted to each other. Some probably were, others probably not. What we can know for sure is that they showed and savored the pleasure of each other’s company. Read more