There is something quietly devastating about seeing Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor together in Ruven Afanador’s promotional photography for The History of Sound. It is not just that they look beautiful, though of course they do. It is that Afanador’s lens seems to hold them in a delicate pause, a moment between desire and loss, a sweetness tinged with sadness that feels entirely queer in its resonance.
The film itself, directed by Oliver Hermanus, is a period romance based on Ben Shattuck’s short story. Set during World War I, it follows Lionel (Mescal) and David (O’Connor) as they travel through a fractured world recording folk songs. Along the way, they find love in a time when tenderness between men was often forced underground. Premiering at Cannes in May 2025 and released in U.S. theaters on September 12, 2025, the movie has already been hailed as a rare entry in the canon of queer period films, one that refuses to sand down either the intimacy or the melancholy.
Afanador, the Colombian-American photographer known for stark black-and-white portraits that feel both sculptural and deeply human, approaches Mescal and O’Connor not as actors selling a film but as fragile figures bound to each other. The shots, distributed by Mubi and quickly adopted across social media fan accounts, are promotional material in name but in effect they function more like art. They echo the film’s themes of memory, preservation, and fleeting connection.
What makes these portraits powerful is not just the chemistry between the actors but the sense that the viewer is witnessing something already fading. Queer stories so often come packaged with loss, yet here the sadness feels soft, almost tender, as if Afanador were letting us sit inside that moment rather than rush past it. These images are not just about selling tickets. They are about keeping hold of something that history has tried again and again to erase: the sound of two men loving each other, even if only for a brief time.
