  A symmetry-preserving treatment of mesons, within a Dyson-Schwinger and
Bethe-Salpeter equations approach, demands an interconnection between the
kernels of the quark gap equation and meson Bethe-Salpeter equation. Appealing
to those symmetries expressed by the vector and axial-vector
Ward-Green-Takahashi identitiges (WGTI), we construct a two-body Bethe-Salpeter
kernel and study its implications in the vector channel; particularly, we
analyze the structure of the quark-photon vertex, which explicitly develops a
vector meson pole in the timelike axis and the quark anomlaous magnetic moment
term, as well as a variety of $\rho$ meson properties: mass and decay
constants, electromagnetic form factors, and valence-quark distribution
amplitudes.
