Boys II men: official navy photos from World War II capture an innocent intimacy bordering on homoeroticism.

During a visit to the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1997, Evan Bachner first saw PBY Blister Gunner, 1944, a photograph by Horace Bristol. Bachner had never heard of the wartime photographer, but the man in the image--proud, masculine, and nude--appealed to his sensibility. "It is a phenomenal photograph, taken very much in the style of Life magazine during World War II," says Bachner, who is gay. He was so intrigued that he made it a goal to "find a few books about this man and maybe at some point own a print."

Bachner's search led him to the National Archives building in Greenbelt, Md., where he found boxes and boxes of roughly 400,000 undocumented wartime photographs by Bristol and many other military photographers. "What I saw was this masterwork, as good as anything from the 1930s and '40s that we'd be familiar with," he says.

Now Bachner's presentation of the best of that collection, titled At Ease: Navy Men of World War II (Abrams, $55), is in bookstores. Though gay readers may key in on the homoeroticism of many of the images, Bachner believes the book shows a camaraderie among males that is lost in today's society: "This was a period before irony, before queer theory. It's not a sexual attraction; it's really about the relationship among the men."