A chance encounter at a New York exhibition opening in 1963 set in motion the meeting between photographer William John Kennedy and painter Robert Indiana, a rising figure in the nascent Pop Art movement, and the two quickly formed a close friendship. Indiana, in turn, introduced Kennedy to an as-yet-unknown Andy Warhol at the Americans 1963 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that same year. Of this chain of acquaintance, Kennedy later reflected that “When I look back on my involvement with the Pop artists, it all came off my initial involvement with Robert Indiana. He was the lynchpin”.

In 1964, Indiana invited Kennedy to his studio, and as the photographer recounted, “and there he was, holding his Love painting". Kennedy raised his camera and recorded the moment, thereby creating the only existing photograph of the artist with this specific painting.

The canvas Indiana held that day was the product of an evolving personal iconography: he had first experimented with the stacked L-O-V-E configuration in 1964, initially as a series of rubbings sent to friends as Christmas cards, before committing it to oil on canvas in the bold Didone letterforms L and O over V and E, the O tilted rightward at a dynamic forty-five-degree angle, which would become the most reproduced images in American iconography.

Indiana himself saw the composition as “the most dynamic way to use four letters”. The word itself carried deep autobiographical and spiritual freight: rooted in his Christian Science upbringing, his contemplation of human relationships, and, as MoMA historian Deborah Wye has observed, "erotic, religious, autobiographical, and political underpinnings” that render the image “both accessible and complex in meaning".

Kennedy, photographing Indiana at his legendary Coenties Slip studio — the Lower Manhattan waterfront neighbourhood he shared with Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, and Cy Twombly — was present at the precise moment a painting first revealed itself as the germ of an epoch-defining phenomenon.

The cultural trajectory of Indiana’s LOVE is unrivalled in the annals of postwar art, and Kennedy’s photograph stands as its documentary origin.

When the Museum of Modern Art chose Indiana’s red, blue, and green variant for its 1965 Christmas card, it reached a mass audience for the first time; Indiana later said it was "the most profitable Christmas card the museum ever published." As America faced the Vietnam War and civil rights protests, LOVE became a symbol of peace, unity, and human solidarity for a generation seeking a visual language for its hopes. In 1973, the US Postal Service used Indiana’s design for a Valentine’s Day stamp, printing over 330 million copies — underscoring its deep cultural reach. Monumental steel sculptures appeared worldwide. The Whitney Museum held a major retrospective, 'Robert Indiana: Beyond LOVE', in 2013–2014, and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park showcased his work in 2022–2023. Against this backdrop, William John Kennedy’s photograph presents the primary record as fine art photography, the sole visual record of a private moment in the artist’s studio when a single canvas was raised by its creator and beheld LOVE for the first time.