New-york based photographer Braden Summers is highly experienced in capturing romance with a single click.
But as a gay man, he was tired of the LGBT community being misrepresented in media imagery – or worse absent completely. He decided to take matters into his own hands.
Summers traveled all over the world to create dramatized romantic scenes featuring only gay couples.
Summers discussed the All Love Is Equal photography series with BuzzFeed and shared a few of the spectacular photographs:
I shot my first gay-centric romantic photo in London with two men, an umbrella, and an iconic bridge.
It made me think a lot about iconic romance in general and how all of the images that came to mind were of straight couples - real or fabricated.
Gay imagery tends to be hyper-sexual, or banal images of everyday couples, or worse yet depictions of our victimization.
I wanted to create a whole series using my London image as a benchmark.
So, I raised over $23K set out with a producer friend of mine to Paris, India, Lebanon, South Africa, Brazil, and the US to shoot the project over a 6 week period.
The images are not documentations of reality, but illustrations using models and real-life couples to help my viewers dream about having that type of romance.
The work is meant to speak to a large audience, it should be reminiscent of the highly-produced romance images that we are fed on a daily basis.
Summers hopes to one day have his photography in a touring exhibition, so he can continue to spread a little bit of romance all over the globe.
