You've got male: clandestine photos of men's bodies - in pictures

Emmanuel Cooper bought a set of negatives at the Portobello Antiques Market in the early 1980s. Cooper was a ceramicist, writer, art critic and gay rights activist. He called this set of anonymous works The Portobello Boys, as he believed they were taken in the North Kensington area between the late 1950s and mid-1960s. Taken in a time before gay liberation , they document young men posing, by turns uncertain and assertive, in a state of undress

Photography: Emmanuel Cooper Archive Bishopsgate Institute