Picture by Robert Gant Small-town Wairarapa in the late 1800s might be the last place you’d expect to find a hotbed of manly affection, but through the lens of gay photographer Robert Gant, Mates he spent the later part of his life with a lover.” Brickell says Gant’s photography clearly has the same influences as American and European photographers, “with the depiction of classical scenes, and the poses of the men, and the sort of loving attention of the camera lens to their physical embodiment in a kind of way that you really don’t see in New Zealand photography,” he points out. “So I think there’s that sense of being able to get a really close view of the world that a few men existed in and that came into a bit of focus in Mates