Body Language: The Queer Staged Photographs of George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa 9780520394636

Citation preview

Body Language

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defining moments in photography Anthony W. Lee, Editor In focused case studies, this series redefines key works in photography’s rich global history by introducing new points of view and juxtaposing different voices from across disciplines. 1. On Alexander Gardner’s “Photographic Sketch Book” of the Civil War, by Anthony W. Lee and Elizabeth Young 2. Lynching Photographs, by Dora Apel and Shawn Michelle Smith, with an introduction by Anthony W. Lee 3. Weegee and “Naked City,” by Anthony W. Lee and Richard Meyer 4. “ Th e Steerage” and Alfred Stieglitz, by Jason Francisco and Elizabeth Anne McCauley, with an introduction by Anthony W. Lee 5. Trauma and Documentary Photography of the FSA, by Sara Blair and Eric Rosenberg, with an introduction by Anthony W. Lee 6. Muybridge and Mobility, by Tim Cresswell and John Ott, with an introduction by Anthony W. Lee 7. Body Language: Th e Queer Staged Photographs of George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa, by Nick Mauss and Angela Miller

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Body Language Th e Queer Staged Photographs of George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa

n ic k m aus s a n d a nge l a m i l l e r

u n i v ersi t y of c a l ifor n i a pr ess

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University of California Press Oakland, California © 2023 by Nicholas Mauss, Angela Miller, and Anthony W. Lee Cover design: Nola Burger Cover illustration: PaJaMa, “Margaret French and Paul Cadmus,” Fire Island, c. 1941, photo courtesy Gitterman Gallery, New York. George Platt Lynes, “Two Male Nudes,” n.d., Guggenheim Museum. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mauss, Nick, author. | Miller, Angela L., author. Title: Body language : the queer staged photographs of George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa / Nick Mauss and Angela Miller. Other titles: Defi ning moments in photography; 7. Description: Oakland, California: University of California Press, [2023] | Series: Defi ning moments in photography ; 7 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2023001490 (print) | lccn 2023001491 (ebook) | isbn 9780520394612 (hardback) | isbn 9780520394629 (paperback) | isbn 9780520394636 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Lynes, George Platt, 1907–1955— Criticism and interpretation. | PaJaMa (Artists’ collective)—Criticism and interpretation. | Black-and-white photography—History—20th century. Classification: lcc tr653 .m384 2023 (print) | lcc tr653 (ebook) | ddc 778.3—dc23/ eng/20230223 LC record available at https://lccn.loc .gov/2023001490 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc .gov/2023001491 Manufactured in Canada

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Th e publisher and the University of California Press Foundation gratefully acknowledge the generous support of the Judy and Bill Timken Endowment Fund in Contemporary Arts.

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To a future history of art

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con ten ts

Introduction 1 Anthony W. Lee, Nick Mauss, and Angela Miller The Uses of Photographs 15 Nick Mauss PaJaMa Drama 75 Angela Miller Notes and Acknowledgments 123 Index

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Introduction anthony w. lee, nick mauss, and angela miller

Almost as soon as the portable camera became widely available in the 1890s and within the financial reach of the middle and working classes, queer Americans began exploring the role photographs could play in imagining—in constructing—both their social worlds and the many ways they inhabited them.1 Particularly in New York, where in the early twentieth century queer culture was open, thriving, and richly textured, the camera had no shortage of subjects or locations, of bathhouses, bars, cafeterias, drag halls, house parties, parks, street parades, and tearooms, from the Bowery to Harlem, Greenwich Village to Times Square, and places beyond.2 In these photographers’ hands, the camera’s special power was its ability to flicker into visibility the many spaces within which queer New York, and the people who occupied it, took shape. Particularly in working-class districts, queer society had an insistent, visible life. In these spaces, queer men readily found and aided each other while navigating the city’s loose surveillance and intermittent regulation. It was arguably only in the late 1930s and extending into the following two decades when a more circumspect photographic practice began to develop as queer culture was forcibly driven underground. The social worlds of queer men did not disappear; they became more segregated and exclusive.

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The effort to picture these networks and the particular social relationships, arrangements, and identities they fostered met with a host of new photographic strategies. In this new generation’s way with the camera, photography tended to become more aware of police regulation and legal restraint, more sensitive to the closeting demanded of queer society, and also quite possibly, from our point of view, even more inventive. This volume of Defining Moments in Photography explores this key turning point in the history of the medium through four of its key figures. Whereas previous volumes in the series have usually focused on a single photographer or body of images, Body Language considers two distinct artists whose seemingly divergent practices overlapped in significant and surprising ways. One “artist” consists of the trio of painters whose photographic collaborations were attributed to PaJaMa (Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret Hoening French); the other is the high-profile fashion and celebrity photographer George Platt Lynes. The four artists knew each other; shared a social world of friends and fellow artists, dancers, and writers; distributed their work among their circle; posed for one another; and exchanged thoughts about their practices. Coauthored by Angela Miller, an art historian, and Nick Mauss, an artist, Body Language is the first book to analyze PaJaMa and Lynes in tandem, paying close attention to their shared strategies of expanded authorship and arguing that these artists used their photographic practices as forms of queer world-making. The term queer world-making brings into focus the manner in which these artists used photography to create a reality beyond social documentation and exceeding the limits of a historical moment, one constrained by cultural taboos and legal injunctions against the visibility of queer sexualities. Photography was particularly suited for building alternative communities, defined by its reproducibility and free circulation through social networks and display, from early cartes de visite to later mass-market publications,

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advertisements, and public galleries and art museums. Such powers of circulation troubled the boundary between public and private worlds, a boundary strictly enforced by the primary institutions of private life in the middle-class republic from the mid-nineteenth century on. In the midtwentieth century, when homophobia reached a fever pitch, the sanctioned preserve of private life framed, contained, and also limited sexuality in all its rich variety. Heteronormative values stemming from the family’s key role in sexual and social reproduction expanded outward to define and limit the definitions of citizenship and forms of community that in turn underwrote the nation-state’s regulation of private life. During a period that saw the public sphere become ever more restrictive of nonnormative sexualities following the relative openness of the 1920s, photography offered a new mode of access to social spaces in which sexuality could be expressed in a range of ways off-limits in the conventional middle-class romantic scenario, in which sex was an intimate affair between men and women, defined by its private nature. The photographs—made by PaJaMa and Lynes—enact the undercurrents of sexual tension, mobile desires, jealousy, power plays, and performative identities that exceeded social norms and definitions of reproductive intimacy. Emboldened by the presence of the camera, these artists perform a social world shaped by uncontained desire, a disruptive force that threatened the stability of the very private sphere whose function had been to regulate desire. Instead, the artists whose work we explore here made their images in the context of nonreproductive social worlds they co-created and shared, confounding the given opposition between public and private, and describing alternative spaces and ways of being together.3 The beach, for PaJaMa, and the studio, for Lynes, emerged as spaces of possibility.

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Figure 1.  PaJaMa, Margaret and Paul, Fire Island. 1944. Gelatin silver print. 4 ½ × 7 in. Courtesy of Keith de Lellis Gallery.

Whether circulated among the closed publics of like-minded friends and associates or through a private language in more public sites, queer artmaking in the years around World War II took shape through a new body language, consciously staged. The bodies that lean and arc toward one another, or tense in taut profile, or confront one another across space, pinioning others with their gaze, are like semaphores—silently communicating to one another in a language of signs that convey desire and deflected longing. Bodies relax into driftwood and sand, or languidly turn away from one another, separated by emotionally charged distances. Figures stand alert as sentinels, or torque and bend with powerful grace. Both essays explore the ways in which such ritualized gestures and actions with symbolic props invent a new kind of queer social enactment taking shape beyond existing genres and practices. Intersubjectivity becomes an important theme across

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our readings of these artists who consistently made work “through the eyes” of each other. This intersubjective nature of PaJaMa’s and Lynes’s queer artistic production blurred the boundary between self and other, public and private worlds, transforming the very subject of photography by implicating the photographer as much as the photographed subjects as co-conspirators in the making of images. But more than capturing the collaborative nature of their games of staging, the photographs reveal their interfiliated social worlds, involving mentorship, reciprocal influence, and the protective “bracketing” of those who in different circumstances suffered psychological and social isolation resulting from their sexual orientation. PaJaMa’s games countered this sense of isolation by playfully affirming group identities. Photography for them was a tool not of self-expression but of enactment: a process shaped by the interactions between and among other selves and responsive to the shifting circumstances coming to light beyond the agency of the individual actor. As Miller writes, “Their performed actions, rather than expressing anterior emotions, actively scripted the raw material of their shared lives. The photographs they made were the trace, or record, of this collective process.” Just how entwined PaJaMa’s and Lynes’s worlds were can be gauged by the many shared models that recur between their photographs and paintings— including dancers José Martinez and John Butler, playwright Tennessee Williams, novelists E. M. Forster and Christopher Isherwood, artist Fidelma Cadmus (Paul’s sister) and her impresario husband, Lincoln Kirstein, actor Sandy Campbell, curator Monroe Wheeler and author Glenway Wescott (with whom Lynes was engaged in a three-way domestic partnership), and painter George Tooker (lover of Cadmus). Paul Cadmus, Margaret French, and Jared French are usually recognized not as photographers but as painters. The hybrid identity that unified them as PaJaMa is as much a new artistic identity as it is a representation of their ménage à trois. Yet it is clear that the camera was not an

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incidental or occasional tool in their hands but something to which they turned repeatedly, beginning in 1937, extending with regularity to 1947, and continuing on, though with less frequency, as late as 1957—in all, a twentyyear odyssey driven by Margaret’s state-of-the-art, handheld Leica range finder. Their total number of pictures is as yet unknown, perhaps numbering in the hundreds. Today these can be found in the Archives of American Art, the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and especially at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where Margaret French deposited a trove of contact prints.4 Private collectors and those to whom the trio gave their photographs may still yield up other examples. A number of these served as source material for paintings, but many were staged solely for the camera. The Leica was passed from one to the other in joint sessions—indeed, one can often infer by absence which of the three had taken a certain photograph. The pictures, almost entirely concerned with their society of three and a small circle of family and friends, were the results of collective experimentation and decision-making. Even their very name, PaJaMa, Miller writes, was “meta-authorial,” identifying the trio’s entangled identities both behind and in front of the lens. Lynes was self-taught, attaining international acclaim as one of the most inventive studio photographers of the 1940s. His particular vision of glamour drew from a vast reservoir of visual culture: the interlocking gaze, the fashion pose, the embodied language of dance, references to classical painting, beefcake, Surrealism, and Hollywood star photography, as well as homages to his own cohort of artistic peers. He moved between genres and invented new ones: psychologically piercing portraits of writers, artists, and other cultural celebrities; insouciant fashion editorials; allegorical nudes; tableaux of alienated eroticism; glamorous photomontages; crystalline images of modern ballet; and hybrids of all the above. Lynes’s images circulated through nearly every possible channel of distribution: from advertising and editorials in mass-market publications to

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the more exclusive gallery and museum exhibitions that featured his work, specialty publications of nudes, and photographs commissioned by the US Air Force during World War II, as well as to the very circumscribed audience of friends and lovers who delighted in the wealth of experimental images Lynes was unable to exhibit publicly but that he gave away as gifts. While recent scholarship has emphasized the compartmentalization of Lynes’s studio practice to allow for his secret exploration of the aesthetic power of the male nude, Mauss looks to the instances in which Lynes refused such compartmentalization through the provocative cross-pollination of his varied genres. Lynes’s images reveal an alertness to the fact that the differences between art lovers, balletomanes, readers of fashion magazines, cinephiles, homosexuals, or literati are tenuous compared with their points of contact. It is precisely the spaces between audiences that Lynes exploited. Viewed in this light, his artistic project is no longer confined to polarities of public and private but can be seen as a larger exploration of how publics are constituted and addressed. The wide spectrum of his creative output and the precision with which he calibrated its various degrees of visibility reflect the work of a tactician attuned to the latest trends in art and fashion, whose ingenuity allowed him to circumvent increasingly homophobic social mores and legal restrictions. A new reading of Lynes’s work allows us to better understand the synergy between the avant-garde and commercial photography worlds in which he was a central player, and to appreciate the subversively queer implications of his variegated practice. Lynes and several members of his inner circle posed in PaJaMa pictures, and all three PaJaMa protagonists posed for portraits in Lynes’s studio. PaJaMa and Lynes shared significant procedures: working collaboratively; playing the simultaneous roles of artist, model, and muse; staging their images; and circulating them as a form of social media—a way to confirm the multiple networks that constituted their lived and desired worlds. One recorded instance shows more directly how their artistic projects merged. A

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page from a Lynes scrapbook commemorates a visit to Fire Island in 1940, where he inserted himself into PaJaMa’s landscape and visual language, producing (or directing) photographs of himself, Cadmus, and “the Frenches” in imitation of PaJaMa’s aesthetic. Lynes absorbed PaJaMa’s ad hoc dramatic scene-setting and also learned from them about the ways in which the camera could become an agent of indirect communication among them, activating a circuit of received or withheld gazes among the players in a scene. These photographs capture a mutual understanding among the four artists, not only due to their apparent lack of inhibition in enacting fantasies together, but as documents of artistic exchanges that fueled a rich collaboration involving play, experimentation, and emulation. These exchanges also highlight the ways in which making photographs was a type of game into which any member of their circle was invited to enter. But as much as PaJaMa and Lynes have in common, the differences in their approaches are significant. Lynes and PaJaMa produced at dramatically different scales. Thousands of Lynes’s photographs and negatives are housed in public and private collections throughout the United States (the full extent of his life’s work is still unknown today), whereas PaJaMa’s output is comparatively limited. Such differences in scale also speak to diverging attitudes with regard to the afterlives of their images. PaJaMa’s informal photographs—gifted to friends—would become the building blocks with which those in the circle selected and sequenced individual images in ways personally meaningful. More ritualized forms of affirmation and friendship involved gift-giving and exchange that helped to cement bonds between and among those in the circle. But their attitude toward potential future audiences was less targeted than Lynes’s: there seem to be no extant PaJaMa negatives; only contact sheets, prints, and albums remain. Lynes also gifted his work to friends and supporters but was far more driven by an “intense concern for what will interest posterity,” negotiating a sale of several hundred prints and negatives to the Kinsey Institute.5 He knew that his work

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Figure 2.  George Platt Lynes, Margaret French. c. 1940. Gelatin silver print. 9 ½ × 7 ½ in. Courtesy of Keith de Lellis Gallery. © Estate of George Platt Lynes.

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Figure 3.  George Platt Lynes, scrapbook page. 1941. Gelatin silver prints on paper with annotations. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. © Estate of George Platt Lynes.

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was not yet fully understood and deliberately laid the groundwork for his legacy, with a future viewership in mind. Whereas Lynes’s identity as an artist was manifested through multiple permutations of photographic practice—spanning the roles of the amateur, hack, avant-gardist, and professional—PaJaMa availed themselves of photography only when they collaborated, anchoring their main artistic vocations in the tradition of figurative painting. And while PaJaMa took up photography with a sense of experimentation and play, Lynes saw himself as part of a photographic lineage, generating “a future history of art”: the tugof-war between his divergent impulses as an artist and as a commercial success played itself out solely in the medium of photography, aspiring, on the one hand, to artistic gravity and, on the other, basking in his near-celebrity status as a studio photographer of high fashion, movie stars, and famous writers. Mauss suggests that Lynes, “as a producer of both the official images demanded by his culture and those forbidden by it . . . presents unwelcome complications to a unitary conception of the artist.” The threat of “pornography,” so closely linked to photography since its invention, troubles Lynes’s deft attempts to capture the nude figure without shame, whereas in PaJaMa’s work, nudity manages to retain a certain innocence. Ultimately, PaJaMa’s practice stood apart from their respective public reputations as artists, offering an outlet for more transitory inclinations in a medium they circulated exclusively among friends.

+  +  +  + PaJaMa consciously plotted their images, staging with humor, irony, and intense engagement the big and small dramas of their everyday lives as a ménage à trois. They engaged both film and melodrama in a manner that “camped” these mainstream forms. As Miller explains in her essay, PaJaMa’s work departed from “the moral and formal gravity of US photographic genres such as documentary, portraiture, and studio still lifes,” drawing from a

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range of contemporary visual languages “in ways that suggest parody, appropriation, and promiscuous genre mixing.” PaJaMa’s style of improvisation—how they made latent tensions visible as a kind of interpersonal theater—must have been eye-opening for Lynes. Certainly their sensitivity to the unfolding dramas of their everyday lives inflected his work in the studio, giving free reign to innuendo, ambiguity, and a more choreographic approach to working with his subjects. In this dense social field of interdependence, actions prompted reactions; gestures are charged, and gazes are returned. Willingly relinquishing artistic autonomy, PaJaMa entered a new and expanded creative world in which the terms of engagement generated both limits and possibilities. The “rules of the game” expanded their authorship through collaboration while restricting the choices they were able to make to those that corresponded with the actions of others. With Lynes, the act of photographing or being photographed implied a different kind of social contract in which fantasy images could be brought to life, orchestrated for the camera in the creative arena of the studio. As Mauss writes, “The start of the photo session in the studio functioned like an entry into a space of mutually established conduct, where, for the duration of the shoot, constraints of the law, as well as social and artistic conventions, lost coherence.” Art historian and artist therefore see pictures by these photographers as “performing,” in the sense that they are efforts not to reflect predetermined identities and stable social worlds but to continually explore, reimagine, and nurture them. Furthermore, they suggest that the carefully plotted picture was an especially attractive photographic language—indeed, something all four shared—that highlighted the exacting gesture, the revealing attitude, and an array of poses that together can be understood as both definitional and enunciative. What are the implications of looking at these images today, when the sociality they simultaneously portrayed and defined no longer exists? When

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the precise meanings these images generated mainly in circulation from person to person are lost? Gifted, traded, collected, or placed into albums, these images were also displayed in the privacy of apartments, and embedded in other artworks as sly allusions to be grasped only by those in the know. They generated delight and gossip, offering glimpses of romantic and domestic triads and circuits of sexual desire.6 But most importantly, these images were evidentiary signs of lived realities otherwise not represented, and even forbidden, by the larger culture. They circulated selectively among friends, lovers, and fellow artists, and occasionally surfaced, like interfering radio signals, in more mainstream platforms, where only a few would be attuned to their enigmatic language. The dense networks of mutual crossmedia influence described in the following essays suggest that PaJaMa and Lynes anticipate postmodern and contemporary modes of artistic production, collaboration, and self-presentation. A serious reading of these complex practices contends that the trajectory of American modernism is not guided by the tension between abstraction and figuration, but deeply inflected by embodiment and performance, specifically by intimate, nonpublic-facing performances for the camera that seem to fit into no preexisting category. Finally, the work of both artists resonates with questions around agency, visibility, and counternarrative explored by a current generation of practitioners whose performative interrogations of photographic portraiture remodel, or stand in tension with, the ubiquity of socially mediated representation. PaJaMa and Lynes both heightened the theatricality of photography, a medium that had come to be framed around decisive moments, documentary witness, or formal explorations of inanimate objects. Both artists suspended the hierarchies of high art and popular or commercial images, of art photography and fashion. Their queering of older genres, hierarchies, and identities torqued fixed assumptions out of their steady orbits to open toward other futures.

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The Uses of Photographs nick mauss

A bottle of men’s aftershave lotion, shaped like a flask of whiskey, dominates an advertisement in the souvenir program for the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo’s 1945–46 season. Branded with the logo of the women’s-wear retailer Henri Bendel, it appears innocuous among the many perfume advertisements that alternate with lavishly printed images of dancers in the program’s pages. The cropped face of a man caught in the instant of taking a drag from a cigarette looms in the background like a rear-projection in a film noir. His eyes are cut off by the upper limits of the frame, and in the absence of his gaze, the spectator triangulates between the bottle, the prominent beauty mark on his left cheek, and the suggestive language of his hand: two fingers touching his lips, the others elegantly splayed between his chin and necktie. He is the essence the bottle promises. “Men, too, may enjoy fine toiletries,” intones the ad copy beneath the tantalizing photomontage, reassuring those men in the audience whose eyes happen to be drawn to this page in the program that—even if they are fans of the ballet or tone their faces with scented lotion—their masculinity cannot be thrown into question. In an era when “homosexuals” (to use the historically loaded category) were forbidden from openly assembling in public spaces, and the representation of homosexuality in films, on stage, or in images circulated

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Figure 4.  Interior spread from Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo’s 1946–47 program, featuring George Platt Lynes advertisement for Henri Bendel. © Estate of George Platt Lynes.

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Figure 5.  Cecil Beaton, Portrait of George Platt Lynes, as reproduced in New York City Ballet’s 1957 commemorative album of photographs by George Platt Lynes. Private collection.

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through the post could lead to arrest, this advertisement stands out for its brazen interpolation of a proto-queer consumer base whose existence was not to be made visible.1 Though “signed” on the upper right-hand corner by the celebrated photographer George Platt Lynes, the image of the enigmatic subject behind the bottle of lotion is in fact a photograph of Lynes by Cecil Beaton, another prominent photographer of the years between the two world wars. Beaton had made this starlike portrait of Lynes—debonair, even imperious—as part of an exchange of coded portraits not uncommon among queer photographers and painters of the period as a means of describing a self-elected “inner circle.” The reciprocal nature of these portraits (Lynes had also made portraits of Beaton) lent the procedure a conspiratorial air—a mirrored roleplay in which artist and model switched places with and for one another. But by repurposing a portrait made in friendship for use in an advertisement, Lynes opened this closed circuit, deftly turning public and private inside out. Appropriating Beaton’s portrait to cast himself as the advertisement’s anonymous object of desire, Lynes scrambled even further the usual coordinates between photographer, subject, and viewer, resignifying a tedious commercial job through a prank that only some members of the audience would have recognized.

+  +  +  + In his afterlife, Lynes has been branded as a homoerotic photographer. This is as much a mischaracterization as the categories (“fashion photographer” and “portraitist”) that circumscribed his layered artistic project while he was still alive. The contemporary focus on Lynes’s male nudes at the cost of his larger body of work deliberately bypasses the complexity of his contribution, not least of which is a singular articulation of an erotics of art. Critics, historians, and institutions adamantly resist assessing Lynes’s diverse output as a singular corpus and do not acknowledge his significance more generally

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within the entangled networks of modernist photography, painting, literature, and dance. Instead, his work is immovably pinned to the side of the mainstream narrative of New York modernism, whose forward propulsion demands a frictionless historical plane. Apprehending his lifeworld through constellated media images of public figures whose auras could penetrate and animate private lives, Lynes constructed his own expanded pantheon, surfacing intimate dimensions of even the most familiar celebrity while imbuing his anonymous, unclothed subjects with the arresting sensuality of stars. As a producer of both the official images demanded by his culture and those forbidden by it, Lynes left a legacy that presents unwelcome complications to a unitary conception of the artist. It is as if it were impossible, or embarrassing, to see Lynes’s photographs for what they actually depict: a directory of modern New York as a palimpsest of known and unknowable individuals, enacting their most public and most private desires in Lynes’s studio—the combined evidence of a singular artist’s struggle to reflect his time in spite of intensifying restrictions on artistic and sexual practice. The writer and editor Donald Windham, who posed for and worked closely with Lynes, explained that those who knew Lynes’s work understood the nudes to be contiguous with his overarching artistic project: Today it is difficult to tell which portraits Lynes took of writers and artists for himself and which were made on magazine assignments. He did not differentiate between his portraits and his nudes. It is fashionable now to say that when they were first made Lynes’s nudes were “private,” in a different category of public visibility from his portraits; but this is a revisionist idea. Official attitudes could be arbitrarily narrower then. In 1943, the post office confiscated an issue of View magazine, purportedly because it contained, in an advertisement for the Pierre Matisse Gallery, a reproduction of a Pablo Picasso pen-and-ink drawing, Le Minotaure; to send a representation that portrayed pubic hair through the U.S. mail was declared illegal. But this narrowness did not extend to the public that went to art galleries.2

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Windham’s assertion that Lynes “did not differentiate between his portraits and his nudes” brings us closer to how Lynes conceived of his work as a whole, and repudiates the liberationist narrative under which Lynes’s nudes are supposedly only now being understood after decades of repression and secrecy. Indeed, Lynes was in the habit of circulating representative samples of his work: envelopes stuffed with portraits of famous novelists and composers mixed together with his pictures of unnamed, allegorical nudes. It may, in fact, be more accurate to say that Lynes’s nudes are today being misinterpreted and misunderstood by being seen as separate from the erotic and psychological charge of his portraits of literary figures, visual artists, dancers, and choreographers. By reading Lynes’s photographs against their categorical assignment to genres, or rather, by reading back and forth across their categorical plenitude, I address their function within the collaborative and transdisciplinary weave of the cultural landscape of 1940s New York. It is here, at the center of several overlapping contexts, that Lynes’s myriad genres reveal themselves as an artistic stratagem deployed to address and create multiple audiences at once, as in the case of his aftershave-advertisement-as-self-portrait, whose meaning oscillates depending on who is looking, and for what. Approaching Lynes’s work as an artistic statement that sparks complexity, we begin to recognize what his shrewd collaborator George Balanchine suggested when he wrote, “his photographs have several lives of their own: as a record, as portraiture, as social-history of the taste of an epoch, and as beauty.”3

+  +  +  + Lynes’s career trajectory has been primarily contextualized through his association with Monroe Wheeler, Glenway Wescott, and Lincoln Kirstein, and their advantageous ties to institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York City Ballet, and the transatlantic literary avant-garde.4 And while Lynes’s relationships with queer painters including Paul Cadmus,

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Jared French, and Marsden Hartley have been well studied, it is surprising that Lynes’s vast body of work (encompassing thousands of photographs) is rarely read in relation to his photographic contemporaries, or as a contribution to the mutually emergent (and often dovetailing) spheres of fashion and art photography, whose juncture served as the training ground of so many modernist photographers, including Erwin Blumenfeld, Philippe Halsman, and Horst P. Horst. His early association with now-canonized photographers such as Walker Evans, Lee Miller, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Berenice Abbott is easy enough to overlook, given that Lynes has been pushed to the margins of the history of vanguard photography.5 Lynes staked his claim on the avant-garde before he emerged as a fashion photographer: confirming his links with important protagonists of the New York and Paris scenes by taking their portraits, publishing nudes alongside Man Ray and others in French photography annuals, participating in The Newer Super Realism (Surrealism’s US debut at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in 1931) as well as in Murals by American Painters and Photographers (1932) at the Museum of Modern Art, and exhibiting his photographs in a 1932 double-bill exhibition with Walker Evans at the gallery of Julien Levy, who advanced Alfred Stieglitz’s “fight for the recognition of photography as a fine art.”6 In 1933 Lynes established his first studio on East Fiftieth Street and juggled assignments for Town & Country, Harper’s Bazaar, and Vogue, as well as private portrait commissions with the stultifying mandate of “making school girls beautifully vague,” while taking every opportunity to continue photographing the literary figures who had been his primary inspiration.7 He opened an exhibition of “celebrity” portraits at the Leggett Gallery that same year, and also photographed (along with Lee Miller and Carl Van Vechten) the unprecedented operatic collaboration between Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson, Four Saints in Three Acts. Concurrently, Lynes found an outlet for some of his “artistic” nudes in specialized French photo annuals, such as NUS: La beauté de la femme (Nudes: The beauty of woman), 1933; Formes nues

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(Nude forms), 1935; and Photographie (Photography), 1933, 1936, 1939—highly produced “art” volumes that mixed avant-garde names with soft-core shots of mainly female muses.8 In 1934 Lynes opened his first solo exhibition, “for art’s, rather than advertising’s, sake,”9 at Julien Levy’s legitimately vanguard gallery. This exhibition, 50 Photographs by George Platt Lynes, presented Lynes’s celebrity portraits as equivalent with his street photography and nudes, embracing this multitude of genres without question—a fact that chafes against the more recent subdivision of Lynes’s corpus into distinct and ostensibly unrelated categories. The checklist of 50 Photographs features associative leaps among famous names—from the Harlem nightlife fixture Jimmie Daniels to international boy toy Denham Fouts, novelist André Gide, and sculptor Isamu Noguchi, followed by anonymous subjects (Parisian), picturesque locations (Under the Pont-Neuf), and finally, one Male Nude, one Female Nude, and one Self-Portrait. When Lynes exhibited photographic nudes in public, he was obliged to create Edenic pairs of “one woman” and “one man,” relying on a heteronormative semblance to justify their bodily exposure. There would have been no precedent in the early twentieth century for a public presentation of photographs of male nudes in frames, on a wall.10 However, Levy kept portfolios of loose photographs by the artists he represented to show to prospective clients, and was able to sell a few of Lynes’s nudes (as well as purchasing some for his own collection) by showing them in this more discreet manner. While it is by now well known that a majority of Lynes’s artistic output would have been deemed inadmissible in public exhibitions, little credit is given to Lynes’s inventive agency, to the many ways in which he did, in fact, show, reproduce, and circulate images of nudes during his lifetime. In the face of a rampant societal panic around the spectrum of sexuality—as exemplified by laws against its normalizing representation in films, photographs, books, or on stage—Lynes made no secret of his passion for photographing the undressed body, just as he did not hide his sexuality. A whole subcategory of Lynes’s—

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predominantly but not exclusively male—nudes were seen, traded, shared, commented on, gifted, and preserved by a small circle of confidants—behind the scenes, so to speak, of the hyperpublic fashion and celebrity images that were widely disseminated in magazines, or of those photographs he exhibited openly in museums and galleries. These nudes, however, do not conform to the unitary “erotic” category into which they have recently been forced, and cannot be severed from Lynes’s “other” bodies of work as easily as it might at first appear. Lynes’s nudes meant different things to different people, and even to Lynes himself: some were made to pass as modern art (“neutralized” under the cover of neoclassicism flirting with Surrealism), others infiltrated his portraits of queer celebrity authors and artists, still others so blatantly visualized an offlimits queer imaginary that they would have instantly exposed Lynes and his models to charges of obscenity. At the same time, many of Lynes’s clothed portraits—such as the large body of little-known photographs commissioned by the US Air Force during World War II—are tautly erotic. While several of the military portrait sessions led to nude shoots, one must keep in mind Lynes’s own complex understanding of how the erotic and the aesthetic are interdependent, as expressed in a 1953 letter to sexologist Alfred Kinsey in which Lynes insisted that his nudes “are not, as you know, ‘pornographic’; and as many as not (or am I wrong about this?) are pure and plain enough to satisfy even the postal authorities.”11 Lynes deliberately skirted the precise distinctions between licit and illicit imagery. When male models arrived on set in the posing straps commonly worn in physique photographs (geared toward a hidden homosexual viewership), Lynes informed them that in his studio, “We don’t use those. We use shadows.”12 Even at the end of his life, in negotiations with Kinsey (who had purchased hundreds of Lynes’s photographs and negatives for the collection of his Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction), Lynes struggled to see where the artistic ended and the erotic began, and asked Kinsey for some

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clarification on the matter: “I wonder if you will not classify as erotic or confidential a number of my photographs which seem to me neither. Please let me have your definition, in this connection, of the word ‘erotic’. It may make a great difference.”13

+  +  +  + Preceding scholarship has imposed a false order on Lynes’s practice, ignoring the ways in which he fundamentally subverted and disrupted categories.14 The separation of Lynes’s photographic subjects (and viewing publics) along puritanical distinctions of “clothed” versus “naked,” or “nonerotic” versus “homoerotic,” is confounded by his practice: the often simultaneous genesis of his distinct bodies of work, or even his penchant for pairing nude and clothed subjects in the same image, challenges the viewer to confront their culturally imposed, rather than self-actualized, definition of eroticism. Richard Meyer has argued against the misuse of historical examples of queer American culture to confirm contemporary conceptions of queerness, stating that “it remains crucial to contend with the difficulty of addressing historical moments prior to Stonewall . . . in which alternative forms of sexual life were quite differently organized, named, and depicted than they are today.”15 Overemphasizing as absolute the midcentury injunctions against homosexual representation discredits the finesse with which Lynes negotiated the hazards of sharing his photographs in overt and covert acts of nonconformity. “Like the censorship of dreams,” Meyer writes, “the censorship of visual art functions not simply to erase but also to enable representation; it generates limits but also reactions to those limits; it imposes silence even as it provokes responses to that silence.”16 We may never understand how these images appeared to the photographer, to the subjects he portrayed, and to the individuals he shared them with. We can, however, pursue a more complex reading of the ways in which these images were generated by and

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received through internalized conceptions of public and private that were constantly shifting, and socially (as well as legally) enforced. Lynes repeatedly ventured to make his nudes openly public throughout his career, while being fully conscious of the attendant legal and professional risks. His partners Wheeler and Wescott even contrived an idea for a book of Greek myths as a culturally permissible pretext for nude, or seminude, photographic illustrations.17 Lynes created an entire series of photomontaged mythological portraits (several of which were published in 1939 in U.S. Camera, accompanied by a text by Wescott), but the book project never came to fruition.18 In 1948 Lynes photographed the dancers Francisco Moncion and Nicholas Magallanes posing for Balanchine’s ballet Orpheus—naked—and managed to insert a nude photograph of Magallanes into the layout of the New York City Ballet program, only to have it withdrawn by company management (by which time thousands of copies had already been put into circulation). Toward the end of his life, Lynes found a forum for publishing entire spreads of male nudes to an interested audience without repercussions: the Swiss homophile publication Der Kreis (The circle), where young postwar photographers such as Karlheinz Weinberger and Herbert Tobias would first have seen, and found inspiration in, Lynes’s images.19 Could Lynes’s work be seen as a new form that fused commercial imaging with vanguard aesthetics, and opened up the performative potential of the photographer’s studio? Would it not be more accurate to call Lynes an artist who used a camera rather than labeling him a studio photographer? What happens when we read Lynes’s photographs as a cross-referenced corpus? Reconsidering Lynes’s work through its operational forms—the scrapbook, the collection, the photograph as gift, the studio as a site of collaboration—helps us see how Lynes seized on photography as a distributable social medium. The most essential qualities of Lynes’s work, I argue, are the motility of his photographs and the built-in layers of meaning that allowed

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them to straddle multiple aesthetic categories and audiences at once, both during his lifetime, and afterward.

+  +  +  + A vivid editorial description of Lynes, published relatively early in his career, corroborates Windham’s assertion that the photographer’s nudes were neither private nor an open secret. “Movie stars and mannequins, prima donnas, debutantes, dowagers, and unattached myths today stand in long rows, waiting for Lynes to make them more unreal. They fully expect to come out of the studio on a higher cosmic plane. The one thing he likes to do is to take pictures of outstanding celebrities—naked.”20 As far as “naked” celebrities are concerned, Lynes resorted to the discreet presentational format of the album and the scrapbook to “exhibit” his nudes to friends and interested parties at his home or studio. The unregulated modes of affiliation engendered by the scrapbook as a social space (and a speculative form of collecting and ordering the world) stand at the core of Lynes’s lifelong artistic project. By the turn of the twentieth century, the scrapbook had expanded from the Victorian repository of the memento to an interface of private sentiment and popular culture. The makers of such books created allusive constellations of “scraps” by rerouting fragments from mass print culture into private logics of signification.21 As an active means to metabolize media images and texts, scrapbooking was a cultural habit as widespread as writing postcards, smoking cigarettes, or practicing needlepoint (all of which Lynes did). Lynes and many of his peers were drawn to the format, which accommodated made and found photographic portrayals of the intimate and the famous, brought together in imaginary (and often impossible, or illegal) social, artistic, or sexual arrangements. Private and future oriented in nature, this form of sequential collage, protected by the covers of a book, which could be closed or opened, ran parallel to the publicly circulated work of countless early twentieth-century artists and poets: Carl Van Vechten, Cecil Beaton, H.D.,

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Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Minor White, and Walker Evans were all makers of scrapbooks.22 Several artists in Lynes’s circle also found novel ways to reimagine the presentation of their work in ways that did not conform to the emerging standards of artistic display and reception in galleries and museums. A resistance to the effects of market-based public circulation led these artists to specify the terms of their work’s access to a limited “inner” public, not unrelated to the gesture of sharing the contents of their scrapbooks. The novelist, composer, and sculptor Max Ewing invited visitors to his apartment on West Thirty-First Street to view the interior of his closet, where he had installed his “Gallery of Extraordinary Portraits” by lining all three walls with clippings of assorted literary, artistic, athletic, dramatic, and erotic “stars” thumbtacked edge to edge. The photographs made by PaJaMa were not intended for exhibition but were given away to intimates who pasted them into albums, or passed them around after dinner among friends. The critic, novelist, and photographer Carl Van Vechten projected his portraits of “extraordinary people” as slideshows in his home, though he also breached the division between private and public by printing his portraits as postcards to be recirculated via mail (Lynes also cut down his own photographic test proofs and mailed these cropped images as postcards). Joseph Cornell liked to place his boxes in the homes or studios of friends, where he knew they would be seen by discerning visitors. Cornell also used the postal system as a medium for intimate exchange, mailing elaborate collage-letters and gifts to the subjects who inspired his work. Rather than staging public exhibitions of her paintings, Florine Stettheimer chose to unveil each new work in her studio by giving a so-called “birthday party” and inviting a small circle of artists and critics to celebrate the new “arrival,” which often featured likenesses of the assembled guests.23 Cecil Beaton, on the other hand, put his private scrapbooks back into public (and market) circulation by officially publishing them in 1937 and celebrating their release with a

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“launch party.”24 A fluid dynamic between public and nonpublic practices was integral to the conception of “modern art,” and stands in marked contrast to a contemporary conception of art as defined primarily through accelerated transactions and public overexposure. The self-styled rituals of exchange and display innovated by Lynes and his peers served to bring the artists into close contact with their viewers, using art as a medium for interpersonal exchange. In nonpublic exhibition formats such as the scrapbook or the private viewing, these artists forged a “counterpublic,” to use Nancy Fraser’s term. The scrapbook in particular was mobilized as “public-making media,” as Bronwen Wilson defines its sixteenth-century antecedent, the album amicorum: “Albums were forms of social media that connected individuals to a network, sometimes strangers, and that network consisted not only of those already inscribed, but also future friends and readers. The album is thus both a virtual collection of individuals and a real one, a space in which a public is assembled and imagined.”25 Beginning with Lynes’s earliest photographic gestures, we can see how he grasped photography as a medium through which he could project, verify, and configure a social world, and establish his place within it. Photographs from his novice period show the teenage Lynes earnestly practicing poses—in full dress, in the nude, or “near nude,” as he called it— that demonstrate his devotion to, and fluency in, the codes of the early twentieth century’s glorification of male beauty in mass print media. In his intuitive grasp of photography as a medium for exploring, capturing, and transmitting the erotic, Lynes, along with countless young men with access to cameras, became an agent of what Thomas Waugh has labeled the “mediatization of the homoerotic male body.”26 This historical process had already been well underway since the second half of the nineteenth century, which witnessed “not only the formation of modern sexual identities—including the modern homosexual himself—but also the photochemical media (photography and cinema) that gay male collectivities would be attracted to as

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the privileged format of their desire. A new sexual minority and a new medium seemed specially suited to each other.”27 Motivated as much by necessity as by autoerotic self-interest, Lynes was his own most willing subject during this “dilettante period.”28 As he trained his eye on the people closest to him, he soon learned to appreciate the camera as a device for seducing those individuals who were beyond the reach of his close family and friends. During frequent visits to Paris in the late 1920s, this selfdescribed “sort of bright unpopular youngster who makes up for being lonely by elaborate make believe about the arts and a cult of certain writers, such as [Jean] Cocteau and [Gertrude] Stein,” successfully insinuated himself into Stein’s salon and the circles of artists, polymaths, and avowed homosexuals who orbited through it.29 He booked appointments to photograph some of the luminaries he used to only dream about, thereby adding as much to his growing collection of pictures as to his future reputation. Early on, Lynes leveled distinctions between iconic public figures and personal intimates. He used his camera to “collect” his own likeness and those of family members and friends, but also literary idols and icons of male beauty, including the dancer Paul Meeres and the famed physique model Tony Sansone.30 Lynes’s expanding practice of collecting, photographing, and scrapbooking teased out relationships between the subjects in a family album, the miniatures sent to lovers, mass media images of celebrities, the sex appeal of modern ballet dancers or even of reproductions of historical paintings and sculpture, and the “artist’s models” featured in physical culture magazines. In this regard, Lynes and many artists of his generation were already elaborating, at least in the private space of the scrapbook, the irreverent, dehierarchizing procedures that are counted among the key contributions of a subsequent generation of artists—namely, Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol. In a letter from 1930, written on the heels of the first presentation of his photographs in public, at the Park Place Bookshop in Englewood, New Jer-

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sey, the fledgling photographer expressed a certain impatience to his lover, Monroe Wheeler: “I should like to develop a style, or rather about six styles a year, but think it unlikely that I will at present. Principally that I have been and will be taking pictures professionally with amateur equipment . . . ”31 Lynes’s cocky tone presumes that only the caliber of his apparatus could stand in the way of his fully developed talent. “Anxious to be known on both sides of the Atlantic,” Lynes would rise to the status of the professional he already envisioned himself to be within just a matter of years, while his insistence on “about six styles a year” forecast his knack for assimilating techniques and influences from anyone or anything that pleased him (indeed, Lynes’s mature work openly admits to a careful study of his transatlantic contemporaries Man Ray, Cecil Beaton, Raymond Voinquel, and George Hoyningen-Huene).32 The idea for Lynes’s suburban bookshop debut— a modest hanging of portraits of literary figures captured during his visits to Paris—was likely borrowed from Sylvia Beach’s Left Bank bookshop Shakespeare and Company, which was decorated with headshots by Gisèle Freund of the modern authors Lynes idolized and pursued as subjects. Having learned that a photographer could breach the distance between fandom and personal acquaintance, Lynes hoped to convert his vocation into a profession. Offering portrait sittings at the bookshop in Englewood could be a means of establishing a client base of fellow bibliophiles who desired proximity to the literary figures he had come to know through his camera. It is telling that Lynes’s very first public presentation is so marked by his dual status as a collector and a maker—his innate understanding of images from the point of view of both consumption and production would mark his entire life’s work. In the portrait sessions at the Park Place Bookshop, for example, Lynes played into a nineteenth-century photographic ritual that was crucial to the development of the concept of celebrity: the photographic carte de visite (visiting card)—a card-sized photographic portrait ordered for the purpose of distribution and exchange among friends and family. Photographs of

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subjects one did not know personally but admired (such as performer Sarah Bernhardt or the poet and playwright Oscar Wilde) became desirable commodities whose circulation contributed to the creation of a culture of celebrity that counted politicians, actors, musicians, novelists, artists, dancers, athletes, and, eventually, Hollywood starlets and bodybuilders among its ranks.

+  +  +  + A curious photomontage made on the cusp of his professionalization, given as a gift to Monroe Wheeler, serves as Lynes’s own imaginary carte de visite, and models some of the tensions that would complicate his future as an artist: the negotiation of self and other, amateur and professional, parvenu and luminary, essence and appearance, candor and artifice. In his composite self-image, a Hollywood-style headshot is wreathed by playful, serious, and wistful images of Lynes’s face and body taken outdoors by Wheeler with a mass-market folding Kodak camera. This swarm of selves performs the concept of the “photogenic,” a neologism that had just come into use in the United States around 1928.33 Attributed to the studio of one “Franco of Englewood,” the central portrait eternalizes Lynes as a lovesick film idol with the soft-focus soul of a poet. His fractured halo of cut-and-pasted amateur snapshots renders the controlled studio chiaroscuro of the central headshot even more artificial, heightening the difference between professional and amateur imaging capabilities, and pitting the larger-than-life effects of glamorization against his miniature performances for his lover’s camera. Taken as a self-portrait-as-gift, this tessellated collage is a catalogue-like offering to its recipient: the images constituting the “frame” present a variety of dispositions and details of Lynes’s real and desirable body in all its spontaneity, whereas the “icon” around which they revolve represents his idealized, thinking, feeling, and ultimately unphotographable mind. As a self-portrait, the image literalizes a sense of yearning to overcome the dis-

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tance between Lynes’s peripheral suburban reality and his aspirations to a central position in a self-made, worldly constellation. As an object of exchange, it signals Lynes’s engagement with an intimist gift economy, one in which the making, giving, and receiving of portraits and self-portraits constituted a type of affective currency.34 Similarly, Lynes, Wheeler, and Wescott compiled several “travel albums” filled with photographs they had given to and made of one another during their period of courtship. The genre of the gift portrait, however, embraced not only lovers but also friends, peers, and other forms of kinship: Lynes’s future homes and studios would be filled with portraits in a variety of media by, with, to, and from the artists he was closest to. His friend Samuel Steward recalled “the 100 framed pictures on the walls—drawings, etchings, a painting or two, charcoals—had all been done by his friends: Paul Cadmus, Tchelitchew, Jared French, a dozen others.”35 Lynes specifically requested images with autographs or dedications from the artists and writers who entertained his insistent barrages of letters, poems, and enclosed pictures. As these epistolary exchanges expanded into friendships, Lynes often bound the photographs and inscriptions that accompanied his heroes’ missives into an album. Cocteau’s photographic carte de visite was one such talisman, inscribed “wholeheartedly” with wishes of “good luck” to the aspiring photographer (and featuring a portrait of Lynes dashed off in Cocteau’s bravura line on the back). Tellingly, Cocteau’s studio headshot is intentionally out of date by several decades; frozen in perpetual youth, the chosen photograph betrays his savvy regarding which image of himself should be reproduced, circulated, and above all, remembered. In the modernist gift economy—governed by unspoken, gamelike rules of call and response, affection, and discretion—the artist’s gift image carried a vitality that was distinct from the public face of the work of art, just as the spoken circulation of a nickname is invested with particular meanings that do not inhere in the officially recorded name on a birth certificate.36

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Figure 6.  George Platt Lynes, untitled self-portrait collage. c. 1935. Gelatin silver print. 8 ½ × 7 ⅝ in. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, Anonymous and In Kind Canada, 1998. © Estate of George Platt Lynes.

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Portraits and self-portraits made and handed over sub rosa constituted an internal dialogue among queer artists in particular—a relay threaded with romantic and/or sexual innuendo, idealization, and barbed wit. Due to their emotional significance and occasional erotic content, such gift images were generally transmitted by hand, or even made on-site during an afternoon or weekend spent together, and remained out of reach of a larger public—that is to say, in private homes, visible only to close acquaintances—until their recipient’s death occasioned an estate sale or auction. In the case of portrait drawings, the affective dimension of this often intense, nonverbal exchange between artist and subject, and the transfer of such renderings from body to body, cannot be underestimated. Describing the experience of being portrayed by Paul Cadmus in his 1942 diary, the émigré novelist Christopher Isherwood noted, “the sensual pleasure of being drawn or painted: this isn’t a question of ordinary vanity: you command, as at no other time, somebody’s total attention: every touch of his pencil on the paper is like an exquisite kind of massage. It is intensely intimate and yet impersonal: there are really three people present—the artist, yourself, and yourself as the model . . . The ego doesn’t interfere. It is far too busy posing.”37 Mementos of an other, or of the self seen enmeshed with an other, gift images transmitted a sense of mutual understanding, respect, and affection that was otherwise lacking in a world in which homosexuals were, at best, tolerated, and granted conditional public visibility only in the form of derisive cartoons. Although commissioned by Lynes, not gifted, Paul Cadmus’s Stone Blossom: A Conversation Piece (1939–40) shares many of the qualities of a gift image in that it addresses the subjects it depicts with a startling intimacy: Lynes, Wescott, and Wheeler. Lynes prolonged the thrill of posing for Cadmus’s painting—and of having his domestic arrangement memorialized—by assiduously documenting the triple portrait’s realization, filling a scrapbook with photographs of preparatory drawings and details of the painting at

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various stages of completion, and zeroing in on significant details and injokes. Of particular interest is the array of print media scattered around the figures lounging on the lawn, which lends the painting an air of nonchalance and pushes Cadmus’s inversion of the traditional conventions of portraying landed (straight) gentry—in the manner of Gainsborough—into (queer) contemporaneity. Conjuring an atmosphere of suburban weekend leisure, the magazines and newspapers also act as supporting evidence of the painted subjects’ cultural achievements, beginning with a print of a pilgrim hawk, in direct celebratory reference to Glenway Wescott’s most acclaimed novel, The Pilgrim Hawk, published in the year of the painting’s completion. Indulging in the tricks of Renaissance masters, Cadmus includes his own likeness and name on the front page of the New York Times, as well featuring his painting Hinky Dinky Parley Voo (included in the 1939 Whitney Annual exhibition) on the cover of the art magazine in which Monroe Wheeler seems to be engrossed. At Wheeler’s feet, we see an exacting replica of the Picasso tome he produced for the Museum of Modern Art in 1939 next to an issue of Time magazine that never existed, featuring a picture of Wheeler’s friend, the pianist Elly Ney, on the cover. A similar bending of fact and fiction inspired Cadmus to paint one of Lynes’s male nudes onto the cover of the U.S. Camera magazine beside him. Though Lynes’s portrait of Salvador Dalí had been featured on the pages of a 1939 issue of U.S. Camera, it wasn’t until 1941 that his work would appear on the cover: a fashion photograph of a female model. Cadmus’s choice of image for the fictive magazine cover is thus both a wish and an impossibility: one of a series of photographs Lynes had taken of a nude male model nicknamed “Petunia” that circulated among his friends. Painted specifically for the closed audience of Lynes, Wescott, and Wheeler (and whatever friends and intimates passed through their home), Stone Blossom naturalizes a scene of suburban homosexual domesticity, making it appear as if it had always existed, its sitters seemingly imperturbable in the face of social stigmas that rendered their por-

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Figure 7.  Paul Cadmus, Stone Blossom: A Conversation Piece. 1939–40. Oil and tempera on linen on pressed wood panel. 22 ¼ × 33 ½ in. Juliana Cheney Edwards Collection and Seth K. Sweetser Fund. Museum of Fine Arts Boston.

trayal, and their lived reality, technically impossible (for a related reading, see Miller, “PaJaMa Drama”). One powerful function of the gifted portrait was to dignify the mutual recognition between artist and subject; its production and reception, however, were not entirely unrelated to the function of currency. As sociologist Marcel Mauss theorized in 1925, the gift is only “apparently free and disinterested but nevertheless constrained and self-interested.”38 While Mauss’s study focuses on premodern forms of gift exchange premised on reinforcing hierarchy and status, I would suggest that Lynes’s deployment of photography in a market-based culture reinvests it with the “archaic” power of the gift. Both Lynes’s self-portrait collage and Cocteau’s carte de visite make

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visible how the private sphere is fused to, or even produced by, the demands of an audience—whether of one or many. Lynes’s drive to photograph subjects distinguished by “worldly greatness and good looks” was symmetrical with their growing need to be photographed (in order to have their likeness in circulation), so that when Lynes’s 1931 amateur snapshot portrait of Gertrude Stein landed on the cover of Time magazine two years later, it cemented Stein’s lifelong desire “to be historical.”39 Katherine Anne Porter, another author who was photographed by Lynes and who would become a close friend and correspondent, assigned Lynes to the position of “official photographer” after their first sitting: Would you please make six more for me, exactly like this one; for this smooth paper is right for newspaper or magazine reproduction, isn’t it? And this shall be my official photograph until you can make me another . . . I am sending this present copy to the editor of Living Authors, some sort of directory, I believe . . . Please keep the plate you have made until I can pose for you again.40

Porter’s pragmatic specifications address the market negotiability of the photographic portrait, whose function is to confirm the subject’s social role. This “Living Author’s” lifelong bond with Lynes ensured that new portraits would be generated regularly, both in the spirit of friendship and in order to keep her public image up-to-date. Lynes was attuned to the variable functions of the photographic portrait (as an opportunity for intimate personal exchange occasioned by the photo session itself, as gift, as token of friendship, as social currency, as networking, and as construction of a public figure) and saw them to be complementary, rather than conflicting. In a letter to Lynes headed with a cut-and-pasted advertisement assigning “The Use of Photographs” to both “Personal” and “Business Purposes,” Max Ewing playfully needles his friend’s reluctance to distinguish between the two: “Consult the above if you are ever in need of an apologia for your work!” Ewing writes, and

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(quoting the camera advertisement), “Let me know if you want to come in the afternoon next week and ‘fill the mind with pleasant recollections, communicate with distant friends, or exchange experiences with others.’ ”41 Lynes himself described the wide net his photographs cast in an article dating from the height of his commercial career, laying bare some of the synergies between his commercial and artistic ambitions: “Even fashion photography verges upon art; and aesthetic excitement without the final satisfaction of fulfilling one’s ideal has a bad effect upon one’s nerves, in certain intimate portraits, and a series of nudes, and various photographic fantasies, I have kept on doing exactly as I pleased. . . . ”42 One of the ways in which Lynes kept on doing exactly as he pleased was by using fashion photography as a vehicle for a surplus of nonfashion meanings. An advertisement shot for Henri Bendel in 1952, for example, shows a female model in a belted woolen dress and gloves positioned before two laundry lines installed against the blank seamless backdrop of the photo studio. But in place of laundry, the wooden clothespins suspend two pen-and-ink drawings, conjuring the practice of hanging photographic prints to dry in the darkroom after their chemical bath. These incongruously presented drawings were made by the artist Alexander Jensen Yow, who frequently modeled for Lynes, assisted with the construction and painting of sets in his studio, and modeled in PaJaMa photographs as well as for Cadmus’s paintings, and finally, lived as Lincoln Kirstein’s lover in the elegant townhouse Kirstein shared with his wife, Fidelma Cadmus (sister to Paul), where Lynes often staged fashion photographs among their collected art objects. While the gloved model in the Henri Bendel ad seems frozen in distracted reverie, her head turned away from the camera, Yow’s brooding, heavily crosshatched ink self-portrait locks eyes with the viewer. Lynes made frequent use of this pictorial device in his late phase, inserting paintings by friends into his photographs to lend a dimension of ambiguity or psychological depth and complexity (even to a

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Figure 8.  George Platt Lynes advertisement for Henri Bendel, unknown fashion magazine. 1952. © Estate of George Platt Lynes.

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fashion image) while announcing his connectedness to a particular artist. The cameo appearance by other artists’ works added another set of eyes to the photograph, multiplying the vectors of the gaze (whose nonverbal innuendoes run as a subtext through Lynes’s body of work) and implying the possibility of role reversals between who is seeing, who is being seen, and by whom. Like Lynes’s intervention into the aftershave advertisement with his own glamorous image (by Beaton), the displacement of Yow’s artworks into the public frame of a magazine page was part of a game Lynes played to see how far he could go in contaminating the highly public arena of print with allusions to his private life. In playfully undermining the regulation of desire and visibility, Lynes elaborated a visual regime in which images, audiences, and subjects are no longer safely contained within certain categories of production. To a potential Henri Bendel customer, the photograph performed its function as a fashion image set off against quasi-surrealist set dressing, and the drawing by Yow might stand in for the object of the model’s affections; to a member of Lynes’s circle, the direct eye contact between Yow’s selfportrait and the photographer behind the camera constituted an audacious intervention into the spaces of mainstream culture; to the unknown queer reader outside this circle, the image would shimmer between its official function and the secret message of artistic and sexual filiation hidden in plain sight.

+  +  +  + Datebooks from the early 1940s record Lynes’s days as hectic with commercial bookings, unannounced spontaneous sittings, prop shopping, correspondence and office work, lunches and dinners, Pilates, drinks at the studio, opera, theater, and ballet, as well as evening photo sessions, all focused around a midtown locus spreading out from “Madison Avenue near where we all lived.”43 His studio was just blocks from the Museum of Modern Art (where Monroe Wheeler worked); practically across the street from the

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offices of Dance Index (where Donald Windham and Joseph Cornell worked) and the School of American Ballet, whose pupils he photographed; two blocks from Julien Levy’s gallery, where he and many of his friends exhibited; and within a fifteen-block radius of the headquarters of various magazines and department stores for whom he shot commercial work, as well as Pavel Tchelitchew’s studio (which also served as the headquarters of Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler’s View magazine, to which Lynes contributed) and some of the cruising coordinates of what was referred to, in conversation, as the “gay world”: Bryant Park, Times Square, and Columbus Circle.44 Lynes’s career gained momentum at the very instant of the transatlantic avant-garde’s opportunistic symbiosis with fashion, perhaps best exemplified by a 1933 showcase of photography at the department store Bergdorf Goodman organized by Julien Levy, the Exhibit of New York Beauty. Levy’s exhibition amounted to a history of recent and contemporary photography, featuring a roster of established, charmingly passé, and up-and-coming practitioners. Levy’s juxtaposition of Lee Miller, Cecil Beaton, Arnold Genthe, Horst P. Horst, Man Ray, Edward Steichen, Edward Weston, Toni Frissel, Carl Van Vechten, and Lynes on the sales floor of a luxury department store showed off his characteristic disregard for “schools” of photography. Whether imagist, vanguard, Photo-Secessionist, or amateur, these visions of “New York Beauty” were uninterested in the distinctions between art and fashion. That same year, Levy hosted the US premiere of Cocteau’s 1932 “poem on celluloid” The Blood of a Poet, using the cinema lobby to display photographs by Lee Miller, who starred in the film as a card-playing statue from ancient Greece. Similar hybrids of avant-garde content, merchandising, and spectacle, with cameo appearances by artist-celebrities, were ubiquitous in the pages of fashion magazines, as well as at the interface of the sidewalk and the department store’s seductive interior: the plate-glass window.45 Like the carefully posed fashion photograph, the artfully arranged

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window presented a general public with a literal showcase of vanguard tendencies, serving as one conduit for Surrealism’s entry into American popular consciousness. The phenomenon of the street-level window as a new condition of vision was also an inspiration to artists—Duchamp’s Large Glass and Joseph Cornell’s miniature arrangements in glass-fronted boxes are only two responses to a new conception of consumerist viewership—and even Alfred Barr, the director of the Museum of Modern Art, claimed that the “show windows” of Saks Fifth Avenue had “done more to popularize the modern mannerism in the pictorial and decorative arts than any two proselytizing critics.”46 By several accounts, Lynes destroyed a large part of his fashion work toward the end of his life so as to secure his posthumous reputation as a fine artist against any misunderstanding. Such a harsh edit to his own oeuvre reads as a late-in-life capitulation to genre hierarchies that rank fashion beneath portraiture, streetscapes, and other more expressly “artistic” subjects, in spite of a career spent disrupting their codes. But if Lynes appreciated that “even fashion photography verges upon art,” he found himself torn, on the one hand, between the high social and monetary rewards for commercial work and the still nascent market for art photography, on the other. Despite his growing disenchantment with fashion work, Lynes strikes an authoritative pose amid his colleagues in a group portrait of Vogue photographers taken by Irving Penn in 1946, which shows them gathered in a pastoral woodland setting, each trying to distinguish themselves by their particular stance and self-fashioning. The lineup consists of Serge Balkin, Cecil Beaton, Lynes, Constantin Joffe, Dorian Leigh (notably the only woman), Horst P. Horst, John Rawlings, Penn himself (holding the shutter release), and Erwin Blumenfeld. Other successful editorial photographers who were active in New York at the time included Allen and Diane Arbus, Otto Fenn, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Lisa Fonssagrives, and the up-andcoming Richard Avedon and Francesco Scavullo, who commented on

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Figure 9.  Irving Penn, Vogue Photographers. 1946. Gelatin silver print. 14 ⅝ × 19 9/16 in. Courtesy of the Irving Penn Foundation.

his colleagues: “We weren’t a very friendly bunch . . . Fashion photographers have always been unfriendly to each other because we’re all basically after the same job.”47 Significantly, Scavullo also recalled that Lynes was the only photographer at the time who welcomed other photographers to his infamous parties. Lynes also taught a portraiture class at the Brooklyn Museum, “where his only dogmatic action to date has been to declare a moratorium on baby pictures.”48 Only in letters did Lynes admit to feelings of admiration or enmity for his professional colleagues, ranking them as follows: “Cecil [Beaton] seems to me the only first-rate photographer who does first-rate fashion photographs. All the others, even the best, seem to me to

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work according to formula, the same thing over and over with only a little variation . . . I sometimes admire the spinsterish [Irving] Penn. But who ever had the idea that he could take portraits? Whom do you admire? Alex [Alexander Liberman] does his best to reduce (or advance) his photographers to a Vogue-level. [Richard] Avedon, whose work has become the all-time low in formula-dreariness, appears to be the Bazaar-level.”49

+  +  +  + Two pairs of distinct images produced against the same backdrop within days (or even hours) of each other circa 1950 demonstrate how Lynes’s various modes often bled into one another, allowing us to track the metamorphosis of a single idea across apparently unrelated photographs spanning fashion, art, ballet, and eros. Seated center stage within a stylish modernist architectural fantasy, a nude male figure buries his head in his forearms, in a pose of introspection. Just beyond him, the interior opens abruptly onto a view of the sea and sky. His back is illuminated by artificial moonlight, his tousled hair falls forward, and his eyes are closed. Orthogonal perspective lines radiate out from, or converge upon, the model’s hunched upper body. He seems poised between two worlds: the romantic backdrop of the vast natural horizon, and the carceral space in which his body is contained. In its mixture of Surrealist and Neoclassicizing tropes, the image falls into the category of some of Lynes’s more well-known “art” images of solitary male figures in existential conundrums who appear to be more statue than human. The image of this “sad young man,” however, originates with an 1836 painting by French academic painter Jean-Hippolyte Flandrin, Jeune homme nu assis au bord de la mer. If Lynes was not familiar with the painting from his visits to the Louvre, he most certainly knew it from the countless uses to which it had been put since the late nineteenth century—gracing postcards, book covers, posters, and pamphlets, and even appearing in photographic or painted “updates” by other artists—as an archetypal cipher for the homosexual’s isolation from

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Figure 10.  George Platt Lynes, Demus. 1937. Gelatin silver print. 8 × 10 in. From the Collections of the Kinsey Institute, Indiana University. All rights reserved. © Estate of George Platt Lynes.

society. The title of this photograph, Demus, comes from the Latin, meaning only/alone and no other/nowhere else. It is one of a few works by Lynes whose title survives with it. Aside from those portraits titled after their sitters, Lynes’s other photographs bore titles suggesting existential conditions, written in pencil on the back of the print beside the studio stamp and the stamps of the photograph’s subsequent owners. Many titles or names of sitters were attached to their images only verbally and are no longer available to us.50 The same hard-edged studio setup used for Demus appears in another photograph, repopulated for a swimsuit advertisement by four young models. Here, the graphic severity of the isolation chamber is made to evoke two

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Figure 11.  George Platt Lynes, swimsuit advertisement with notes for retouching. C. 1937. Gelatin silver print on board with annotations. 13 × 10 in. on 16 ¾ × 12 ¾–in. mount. Courtesy of Keith de Lellis Gallery. © Estate of George Platt Lynes.

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striped beach cabanas on the Riviera. In the surviving photographic proof, annotated in Lynes’s hand with directives to his retoucher (and occasional model) Bob Bishop, three men in swim trunks are positioned on the pedestal bench formerly occupied by the solitary introvert. All three of them direct their attention toward a woman in a chic swim ensemble who stares out haughtily at the camera, her right hand upraised, as if to shield her eyes from the brightness of the artificial sun.51 But one of the male models is only moonlighting in the photograph—it is the American ballet dancer Nicholas Magallanes, who posed frequently for Lynes in ballet photos, nudes, and hybrid genres.52 Magallanes reappears in another studio seascape taken not long after the swimwear advertisement—this time he is posed with dancer Tanaquil Le Clercq in an image of the 1950 ballet Jones Beach, choreographed by Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. Le Clercq’s body—coiled in a clenched fetal position and suspended in midair by Magallanes’s clasping arms—is the central focus of the photographic composition. As if trying to appraise her condition of withdrawal, Magallanes touches his forehead to Le Clercq’s body/shape. The desperate futility of their misconfiguration only makes the pairing more heartrending. It is a choreographic image that reappears in several other dances by Balanchine as a twentieth-century discomposure of the romantic conventions of the pas de deux; the female dancer disappears into her own object-like physicality while being manipulated by a male partner who cannot bridge their psychological distance. Lynes elaborates the striking affinity between Le Clercq’s compressed body and the inwardlooking pose of the “jeune homme nu” archetype in a shocking revision of Flandrin’s seaside sublime to create one of his own most powerful works, photographed on the same set, and perhaps even during the same day or night of shooting the Jones Beach image. Switching out Le Clercq for a male model, he rotates the self-contained pose in profile by ninety degrees to face the viewer, and then rocks him onto his back, thus abstracting the body into a perfect tear shape. The simplified ocean horizon draws attention to his

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Figure 12.  George Platt Lynes, Nicholas Magallanes and Tanaquil Le Clercq in Jones Beach. 1950. Gelatin silver print. 10 × 8 in. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, New York Public Library. © Estate of George Platt Lynes.

sharply lit anus and scrotum. As a flagrant consecration of the rectum, Lynes’s image flies in the face of what Guy Hocquenghem described, thirty years later, as the “peculiarly repressed nature of this zone of the bourgeois body.”53 From parroted cliché to astonishing reformulation, this distortion of a pose in the span of a handful of photographs taken within the same period

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Figure 13.  George Platt Lynes, untitled. Undated. Gelatin silver print on board. 10 × 8 in. From the Collections of the Kinsey Institute, Indiana University. All rights reserved. © Estate of George Platt Lynes.

elucidates Lynes’s mnemic, recombinatory artistic process as an arrangement of bodies, across genres, over time.

+  +  +  + While modernist photography appears invested in an exploration of public space—embracing the happenstance of the urban terrain as a hunting

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ground for decisive moments—Lynes’s signature style of high-keyed artifice and Caravaggist lighting schemes depended entirely on the studio as a controlled environment in which he could calibrate (and orchestrate) every last detail. But Lynes consistently sabotaged the seamlessness of studio illusion with a studied nonchalance. Raw edges, visible stage lights, and glimpses beyond the set into the studio’s shadowy depths unmasked fantasy as a type of stagecraft. What further distinguishes Lynes from his fellow studio photographers is his emphasis on the workspace as the artist’s studio writ large, including the myriad possibilities for the creation of images, for social contact, and for the surprises that it afforded. More than a mere backdrop, then, the studio appears in Lynes’s work as a hinge between the public world and the protected spaces of imagination and intimacy; in Russell Lynes’s description, the space is an endless backstage in which his brother’s subjects wander, as if probing their own subconscious, among “things from the flea market, stuffed animals from a taxidermist, rectangular boxes in various sizes painted white and strong enough for a model to stand on or lean against, pieces of driftwood, a paint-stained ladder [which he used as a prop for Jean Cocteau, Gloria Swanson, and others], a piece of Victorian iron fence, egg crates, anything that took light handsomely and added ornament or character or entertainment to a sitting. In another corner was a jukebox that filled the studio with Gershwin and Cole Porter and the voices of his favorite jazz singers.”54 Though I have suggested that Lynes chose the studio for the aesthetic and technical control guaranteed by its containment, the question presents itself: how much of a choice did Lynes really have? The space of the street was unavailable to queer photographers of the era, and furthermore, the public realm reflected only one dimension of their lived reality. Other spaces had to be found in which self-representations could be constructed. The fashion photographer’s studio offered a convenient alibi in that it was implicitly understood to be the site of production for a wide range of images exploring

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sensuality, fantasy, and the objectification of bodies. In the delimited zone of the studio, certain kinds of expression, behavior, and intersubjective exchange were not only permissible but also imperative. It is important to note that Lynes was not alone in using his commercial studio to experiment with new ways of imaging queerness, either subversively in commercial advertisements, or in unexhibitable images that circulated privately. The fashion photographer Clifford Coffin, for example, who attended a series of “small and informal classes” held by Lynes “in his studio after working hours,” also shot male nudes in his studio after dark.55 The fact that photographers oscillated between the public image of their official work and the erotic permissiveness of their nonpublic work suggests that the act of photographing and of being photographed were part of a social contract in which fantasy images were brought to life through their orchestration for the camera, witnessed and indexed by the apparatus in the form of photographic prints that could be seen only in person and exchanged hand to hand, but that were kept from trespassing the threshold of public circulation and visibility. The start of the photo session in the studio functioned like an entry into a space of mutually established conduct, where, for the duration of the shoot, constraints of the law, as well as social and artistic conventions, lost coherence. To the outside world, Lynes’s 640 Madison Avenue studio—an extension of Lynes’s public self—projected a glossy image of success. But internally— booked with fashion editorials, portrait commissions, and dance shoots by day and unpaid shoots with friends and lovers at night—Lynes referred to the studio pandemonium over which he presided as “fraught” by the incessant stream of ambiguous muses and clients that defined the studio’s day-today activities. Fashion models, dancers, artists, assistants, choreographers, editors, curators, novelists, poets, “trade,” and lovers pulsed in and out of the studio with a frequency that was matched only decades later by Andy Warhol’s Factory.56 Out of this flux—jumbling the personal and

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the professional—emerged new hybrid image types: the nude ballet, the portrait/still life, the still life/nude (figure 13), the existential fashion photograph (figure 11), and the official portrait collapsed with dreamlike enactments of sexual flashback or fantasy (figure 15).57 Unconventional image categories such as these were generated through proximity, chance, and improvisation. Lynes prided himself on the fact that “I have always been able to maintain an unprofessional, inspirational attitude in a part of my work.”58 In the lineage of Velázquez, Manet, and Courbet, Lynes exposed the studio as the site of the creation of pictorial self-reflexivity. In his eyes, the “indifferent camera”59 of “straight” documentary photography betrayed a lack of intimacy between photographer and subject, prompting the realization that “the facts which the camera can testify to, color left out and movement stopped, really do not suffice to give an impression of the truth.”60 This runs counter to the assumption that Lynes constructed escapist images—he simply did not believe that documentary photography was true enough. Skeptical of concurrent trends in photographic naturalism or objectivity, Lynes saw in photography’s claim to “truth” a philosophical predicament, one that forced the artist to ask: “What can the camera do besides document?”61 And whether or not the camera is capable of doing “something more than mirror, and report, and baldly and literally perpetuate.”62 One of his most effective techniques for drawing out his subjects was to deliberately play up the commotion of the professional photo studio (with its intimidating equipment, outlandish props, and the pronounced chain of command between the “master” and his bustling assistants) to distract his sitters into revealing themselves. “Malicious friends said I was like a cat,” Lynes noted, “hiding behind the camera, pretending to play, watching for the mouse of personality to come out of its hole—not really admiring, just hungry.”63 Donald Windham recalled one of his own portrait sessions: “when Lynes photographed me in my corduroy suit

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and seersucker shirt, I was waiting, listening to him telling his assistants to conceal a lamp behind a prop, to adjust a spot or bowl, and wondering when he would get around to directing me beyond casually suggesting that I try looking right or left, when he announced that the sitting was over.”64 With an elaborate lighting rig (including a self-fashioned precursor to the now ubiquitous ring light), Lynes achieved the fine modulations that were to become his signature—what he described as “a new style of portraiture: giving the effect of depth of focus, of solidity in space, unlike the usual imitation of oil painting; a very luminous effect, instead of theatrical spottiness in confused shadow.”65 The high professional standards of Lynes’s studio imbued the operation with an appropriately “official” appearance, and his remarkable level of technical proficiency registered as favorably masculine, repelling the implication that “fashion photographers must be either women or effete males.”66 To his mother, however, Lynes described the space in the tone of a daydreaming child: “I have a studio full of stuffed animals, skunks and squirrels and rabbits and a raccoon and a woodchuck and a bluejay, which look extraordinary. There are plaster clouds hanging from the ceiling and marbleized drapery on the wall and a thicket of apple branches in one corner.”67 Many of Lynes’s favored scenographic tricks were likely informed by his friendship with the painter Pavel Tchelitchew, who was counted among the most innovative set and costume designers in dance at the time. Their relationship dates back to Lynes’s “apprenticeship” with Gertrude Stein in the early 1930s. At that time, the two artists shared the model Charles Levinson (known as “Le Vincent”), a fixture of Paris nightlife who bore a garland of roses tattooed across his sternum and portraits of friends and lovers on his arms.68 In New York, both Lynes and Tchelitchew made portraits of Féral Benga, the Senegalese music-hall performer and model who had danced

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with Josephine Baker and also starred in The Blood of a Poet.69 Between the years 1937 and 1940, Tchelitchew painted a triple portrait of Lynes in the genre of “the artist at work.” In the painting’s immediate foreground, Lynes is dressed in a ragged knit sweater (Lynes would photograph both Cecil Beaton and Tennessee Williams in the same bohemian sweater in 1944) and peers into the ground glass of his eight-by-ten camera. What Lynes sees is not the cloudy, inverted image cast by the subject in front of the lens, but his own reflection—the ground glass has become a mirror (as is only fitting for an artist who signed telegrams to his lover NARCISSE).70 In the distance, Lynes appears again in full figure, wearing the dark blue workman’s coveralls he often affected in the studio and holding a large-format negative up to the light. The pictorial space between these two aspects of Lynes is measured in buoyant cascades of a vaporous dark material that seems to emanate from the camera’s velvet focusing cloth; but among the folds of translucent fabric, dark, flexible infrathin image plates—like oversized sheet negatives—float from the distant figure of Lynes toward his double in the foreground, who gazes searchingly at his reflected image. One of these animated mental negatives morphs into a third likeness of Lynes in profile, while others carry inchoate images yet to be developed. George Platt Lynes is more than a visualization of the photographic process (and apparatus) itself—a subject for which there was little precedent in painting during the 1930s. It is a reimagining of photography’s technical procedures as a form of existential alchemy fueled by the reactivity between inspiration (vision), observation (sight), and self-knowledge. Lynes’s pride in being portrayed (and thereby seen) so profoundly by another artist is evident in the photographs he staged of the painting’s genesis in Tchelitchew’s penthouse studio—returning the favor, so to speak, by continuing the game of the reciprocal portrait. The painter is shown at an easel, as if putting finishing touches on Lynes’s portrait, surrounded by

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Figure 14.  Pavel Tchelitchew, George Platt Lynes. c. 1937–42. Oil on canvas. 49 × 36 in. Courtesy of David Zwirner Gallery.

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vestiges of his work, while George Tichenor (Lynes’s studio assistant as well as the object of his infatuation) poses in front of the canvas, nude. By positioning Tichenor as the model for Tchelitchew’s portrait, Lynes emphasizes the degree to which Tichenor is entwined with his own personhood. Lynes’s intermedia dialogues with painters, as well as his reversible status as artist and artist’s muse, are significant and deserve studies of their own.71 His personal collection of artworks served as echo and proof of the world he constructed through his life’s work. Balanchine described with great feeling the inseparability of the photographic subjects Lynes collected with his camera and the paintings that populated his living spaces: “George loved dancers around his studio and his home. They were not alone his subjects but his intimates—like his beautiful pictures: his early Picasso, the Klees, the magnificent Tchelitchew “Golden Leaf,” and his fine modern American drawings. His true family consisted of painters and poets. His sequence of heads and figures of Wystan Auden, of Jean Cocteau, of Igor Strawinsky [sic] show him as an important biographer, an indispensable social historian.”72 But Lynes also absorbed other artists and disciplines into his work, often through direct collaboration in the studio. Not only were Lynes’s ballet pictures often posed for the camera by choreographers, Lynes even went so far as to hand the camera’s shutter release to Balanchine himself, so that he could “take” the pictures that so accurately evoked his own dances. Who better than Balanchine, the author of these unpredictable sequences of movement, to know when their decisive moment would reveal itself?73 Many of the male ballet dancers who were brought over to be photographed (from the rehearsal spaces of the School of American Ballet just across the street) transitioned from models to friends, muses, and occasional lovers of Lynes and the circle of painters who were his closest artistic and personal associates. The dancers’ aptitude for producing an endless stream of images with their bodies, coupled with an innate grasp of pose as a carrier of narrative (and gendered) psychology made them perfect collaborators, and

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Figure 15.  George Platt Lynes, Pavel Tchelitchew in studio with George Tichenor. 1942. Gelatin silver print. 8 × 10 in. From the Collections of the Kinsey Institute, Indiana University. All rights reserved. © Estate of George Platt Lynes.

Lynes transposed what he had learned in their sessions to his shoots with other models as well.

+  +  +  + Lynes’s porous practice—his ability to apply the techniques and conventions learned in one context to another—stems from a fundamental irreverence rooted in his self-taught (and self-invented) status, and was animated by his view of collaboration as an opportunity to momentarily inhabit another artist’s work. Recalling his precocious wish for “about six styles a year,” it is not surprising that Lynes became adept at getting into the minds of other artists,

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viewing collaboration as a momentary channeling of their “style.” A 1941 visit to Fire Island with his friends Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret French prompted Lynes to riff on the staged plein air photographs the three painters had been making as PaJaMa (and in which Lynes had already posed). Using a handheld medium-format camera, Lynes availed himself of PaJaMa’s lexicon of natural and man-made props washed up by the sea—tortured driftwood figures or branches, weathered window frames and ladders—to photograph these three collaborators in art and life against the backdrop most identified with their silently ludic photo performances (see figure 3). Lynes’s winking “imitation” of PaJaMa suggests the way in which this group of artists understood artistic practice in intersubjective terms, rather than as a declaration of singular originality. The open movement of ideas and borrowed (and even distorted) influences in all directions suggests that “originality” was not proprietary but was surrendered to, and transformed by, a constantly evolving condition of play. A scrapbook page commemorating this particular Fire Island visit shows Lynes posing nude beside a driftwood branch that casts arterial shadows on his bare torso (reminiscent of the visible nervous systems of Tchelitchew’s paintings of transparent figures, which he referred to as “interior landscapes”)—literally inserting his photogenic self into PaJaMa’s allusive terrain. In the most theatrical of Lynes’s images, two figures in silhouette capture the diffuse glow of the setting sun in a cloth stretched between them, while in the foreground a third figure raises arms toward the sky in a loose balletic fifth position. Margaret, the subject of several images, is draped in a costume-like baroque shroud and peers through the remains of a wooden trellis, or poses beside an abstract snarl of driftwood that dwarfs her. A signature aesthetic device in PaJaMa’s images, driftwood, was included by Lynes as he ventriloquized PaJaMa’s visual dialect. Conjuring mutable, inchoate, subconscious forms, driftwood is a kind of “found” art formed by nature that contrasts with human attempts to make limited meaning through form, including PaJaMa’s pantomimes

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themselves. One particular piece of driftwood recurs across both PaJaMa’s and Lynes’s images, appearing less like a set piece than a personification or an “actor” among the flexible PaJaMa cast. Evidently part of a large tree’s root structure, this driftwood “figure” is especially animate and open to associations, its jagged angles and apertures recalling Icarus crashing to earth with his molten wings, legs akimbo. Lynes photographed both Paul and Margaret beside it, but PaJaMa also made images of Margaret seated beside the figure, her back toward the camera (see figure 32). This driftwood presence, then, is no longer just a prop; it takes on the importance of a model shared between these artists who already shared so much. Several of Lynes’s portraits of Cadmus restage shots that Lynes had already taken of Margaret, but with Cadmus they seem to find their emotive focus. Cadmus holds the trellis upright and gazes through it as if peering through the window of a house that has blown away around him. Against sea, sand, and tousled grass, Cadmus’s solitary presence and the ruined grid he clings to mark the tenuous boundary between states of interiority and exteriority, between material construction and mental construct. Halfway through the scrapbook page, the location of the photographs shifts from Fire Island to a rural domestic interior (likely Stone Blossom), where Cadmus is seen fully dressed, at the threshold to the outside world. The eye darts back and forth on the page between Cadmus, the forlorn figure in a house without walls, and Cadmus, the nattily dressed bachelor in the picture-perfect American home. Rather than reading this sequence as an imaging of “before” and “after” or a similar narrative of transformation, I would argue that Lynes’s divergent portrayals of the same person deliberately refuse his integration into a single self-identical subject. One set of photographs seems to be the dream, while the other represents reality, but we cannot know whether the domesticated Cadmus dreams of the wild seclusion of the surreal terrain, or whether the solitary character on Fire Island dreams of the semblance of middle-class normativity.

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Figure 16.  George Platt Lynes, scrapbook page. 1941. Gelatin silver prints on paper with annotations. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. © Estate of George Platt Lynes.

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The migration of subjects, styles, and props among the practices of affiliated artists is evident in Lynes’s consistent incorporation of influences. But the degree to which PaJaMa’s visual imagery impacted his own shows itself most surprisingly in a photograph made under conditions apparently far removed from the intimacy and play of close friendship: a professional portrait of the Hollywood film star Gloria Swanson, shot in Lynes’s studio with a large-format camera. Here the dilapidated Fire Island trellis reappears, and Swanson—head turned in profile—clutches its rungs, transposing the memory of Cadmus's pose, her gaze directed beyond the edges of the photograph. The trellis now seems to grow from an artfully arranged still life of flotsam anchoring the composition—a carved oversized wooden rooster mask, giant pine cones, and a distressed snarl of driftwood. The natural Fire Island horizon has been replaced by a blank backdrop, against which Swanson’s poise and the precarity of the jagged props are thrown into dramatic relief. Unable to conjure the enigmatic quality of PaJaMa’s amateur images “on site,” Lynes absorbed aspects of their aesthetic and material vocabulary into his polished studio assignment, as if recalling the weekend escapade with his closest friends, using the unwieldy souvenirs he literally transported from Fire Island to Madison Avenue as props. By reenacting “on the clock” the images he had made “for fun,” Lynes again fused his intimate and public lives. So many of the sets and props Lynes used in the studio recur across bodies of work intended for entirely different audiences, but there is no way of knowing today if a certain idea was transposed from Lynes’s commercial work with a professional female model onto his work with ballet boys in dishabille, or vice versa. Instead, Lynes made one the pretext for the other by choosing sets and props that could do double duty, so to speak: meeting the demands of fashion assignments and equally contributing to his psychosexual tableaux. There is a virtuosic, even defiant, aspect to Lynes’s shifting of gears from glamorous images keyed to mass appeal to amateur models and friends fully exposed in ways considered criminal at the time, or novelists

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Figure 17.  George Platt Lynes, Gloria Swanson. c. 1941. Gelatin silver print. 10 × 8 in. Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York. © Estate of George Platt Lynes.

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and poets presented as vulnerable, living monuments. But to imagine the atmosphere of invention, fantasy, and trust that Lynes conjured with his sitters is to grasp the studio as a crucial expression of a world apart, or parallel, to the one that Lynes and his subjects otherwise inhabited, a space in which the intimate, the social, the imaginary, the commercial, and the personal coexisted. In Lynes’s final solo exhibition, held in 1941 at the gallery of Pierre Matisse and titled Two Hundred Portraits by George Platt Lynes Plus an Assortment of Less Formal Pictures of People, Lynes allowed the affective montage logic of the scrapbook to become public, mounting his photographs in cluster formations or checkerboard patterns on large panels, like blown-up pages from a disassembled album, in gallery spaces punctuated by driftwood contortions. The centerpiece of Lynes’s exhibition of portraits was in fact the very same driftwood “figure” that made appearances in both PaJaMa’s and Lynes’s photographs from the same year. But given that none of the photographs on view in the gallery were taken on his visits to Fire Island, the driftwood’s prominence within the exhibition registers at first sight as a chic decorator’s trick, heightening the modernity of an interior through a play of contrasts with natural materials against industrial surfaces. The unnameable “figure,” dramatically backlit to emphasize its graphic qualities, appears like an ancient, even arcane, fragmentary presence surrounded by so many modern, identifiable portrait subjects. To Lynes’s friends who visited the gallery, however, the figure would evoke PaJaMa’s tableaux and the complex rituals of relation they enacted under the open sky. Lynes’s friends would have been aware of the fact that the “two hundred portraits . . . plus an assortment of less formal pictures of people” on view were only the tip of the iceberg. And they would have been privy to his scrapbooks as well as to PaJaMa’s images—perhaps they had been recipients of Lynes’s photo postcards, or sometime models for photographs whose informality would have prevented them from being exhibited here. Lynes’s gesture of disloca-

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Figure 18.  George Platt Lynes, installation view of Two Hundred Portraits by George Platt Lynes Plus an Assortment of Less Formal Pictures of People at Pierre Matisse Gallery. 1941. Gelatin silver print. 8 × 10 in. From the Collections of the Kinsey Institute, Indiana University. All rights reserved. © Estate of George Platt Lynes.

tion was a way to fold PaJaMa into a public display without exposing the private activities captured on film by the trio, at least two of whom (Jared and Paul) were represented in their “public” guises by portrait photographs on the walls. The driftwood figure—in its recurrence across several different fields of practice—served as a proxy for Lynes’s multiple lives as a photographer, and for the web of intimacies that bound his portrait subjects together.

+  +  +  +

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Little attention has been paid to Lynes’s lifelong investigation of the photographic self-portrait: as performance, as self-representation, and as a means to secure a future. A series of posed self-portraits taken at the height of his career in the 1940s seem to be publicity photographs, reveling in the slippage between the celebrity photographer and photographer as celebrity. These staged glimpses “behind the scenes” show Lynes through the various functions of the space that confirm his profession, even granting a glimpse of Lynes “on set” with models and assistants. James Ogle, one of Lynes’s first assistants, also made a remarkable series of studio action shots: color images of a bronzed, shirtless Lynes balancing on a paint-splattered ladder, while Ogle, also seminude, reaches up to adjust the camera’s aperture (pinned to the wall behind them is a large Tchelitchew drawing of a centaur about to shoot an arrow from his bow). Ogle’s images capture Lynes as his former model and colleague Lisa Fonssagrives recalled him: “stripped to the waist . . . he moved like a dancer” and was “made like a Greek statue.”74 A photograph of Lynes’s empty studio office, however, signals most clearly how it is that he desired to be seen. Behind a polished corporate desk, enlarged photostats of works from Lynes’s own collection, including Henri Cartier-Bresson’s 1933 image of children playing in a ruined street in Seville and Felix Nadar’s 1859 portrait of the dashing artist Gustav Doré, are mounted directly to the wall in trompe l’oeil wallpaper frames.75 The choice of Cartier-Bresson and Nadar seems calculated to position Lynes on a broad (and very French) historical and stylistic continuum that spans from his vanguard contemporary to one of the most well-known Parisian portraitists of the nineteenth century. Pressed under the glass surface of the monolithic desk is Tchelitchew’s 1935 ink drawing of the young Lynes (today in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art)—a token of their friendship, always close at hand, as Lynes wrote his perpetual stream of letters on official studio letterhead, dashed off notes on the backs of photographic proofs he had cut down to the size of postcards, or received phone calls on two matching telephones.

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Figure 19.  James Ogle, Portrait of George Platt Lynes in His Studio. c. 1940. Cibachrome print. 10 × 8 in. Gift of Carlton Willers. Princeton University Art Museum.

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Figure 20.  George Platt Lynes, George Platt Lynes’ Office. Undated. Gelatin silver print. 7 11/16 × 9 11/16 in. Art Institute of Chicago. © Estate of George Platt Lynes.

Another view of the same office includes Lynes himself, casually curled up on his studio couch, the wall behind him again decoupaged with manipulated reproductions of photographs by others rendering the wall as an oversized album page, or a personal gallery of his elective affinities that mapped a social and imaginary world of friends, colleagues, and photographic ancestors.76 Absorbed in the act of writing—perhaps marking up a photograph or composing a letter—Lynes is surrounded by carefully styled artistic clutter, including fashion proofs, piles of Vogue magazines, and even photographs of nudes scattered casually on the floor, as if a visitor had just leafed through them. Certain visitors to Lynes’s studio were allowed to freely page through

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Figure 21.  George Platt Lynes, self-portrait at 640 Madison Avenue. Undated. Gelatin silver print. 10 × 8 in. From the Collections of the Kinsey Institute, Indiana University. All rights reserved. © Estate of George Platt Lynes.

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the albums of nudes he kept there. Of Cecil Beaton’s visit with his friend actress Greta Garbo, Lynes recalled that he “had fun one day showing her my scrapbooks of nudes. She looked carefully at the females and at the boys with the big you-know-whats, skipped quickly over others.”77 Lynes must have been thrilled by the scene of a celebrity such as Garbo paging through his work, especially since Garbo’s own image had been fodder for scrapbooks just like the one she was currently perusing in his studio, and her likeness was featured among the many others that papered the studio walls. Lynes’s relationship to his own work became increasingly recursive and intercalated with nods to his inner circle. Photographs of mirrored or multiplying subjects, and a reliance on images within images, recapitulated the concept of the mise en abyme (an image within an image, or a story within a story), invented by one of Lynes’s earliest portrait subjects, the French novelist André Gide.78 Grids of Lynes’s celebrity portraits began appearing as backdrops in fashion photographs as well as in his studio nudes. What Balanchine had dubbed Lynes’s “sequence of heads” was the result of a lifelong manic acquisitiveness. But his pantheon of publicly recognized individuals was continually variegated by subjects found within the domain of his intimately entangled chosen family. “Kiko” Harrison, the younger brother of Lynes’s “sister-in-law” Barbara Harrison Wescott, frequently served as a model both in and out of clothes, and appears in a 1942 photograph taken in Lynes’s studio office. Splayed out on the couch, stark naked and pretending to sleep, Kiko resembles a latter-day Endymion (the mythic shepherd whose youth the gods sought to preserve by casting him into perpetual sleep). Perhaps the image is a casual sequel to Lynes’s Greek myths, which his studio manager, Dora Maxwell (who went on to marry Kiko), referred to as “George’s Studies of American Bird Life.”79 Kiko’s head tilts toward the “jungle of plants” by the window, and a grid of framed Lynes portraits hangs on the wall. In this setting, the handsome nude seems entirely out of place. A glassine envelope in which the photograph was stored (and likely gifted)

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Figure 22.  George Platt Lynes, Francis Burton Harrison Jr. (Reclining Nude on Settee). 1942. Gelatin silver print and annotated envelope (print measures 2 ½ × 2 1/16 in. and is glued to a larger sheet). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Purchased with the Lola Downin Peck Fund, 2015, 2015-46-12. © Estate of George Platt Lynes.

bears the traced outline of Harrison’s body, as well as tracings of the portraits on the wall behind him, labeled by name: Balanchine, Margaret French, Glenway Wescott, Marion Dorn. Carefully indexed, the multiple subjects of this image recall Donald Windham’s assertion that Lynes “did not differentiate between his portraits and his nudes.” Lynes’s hand-drawn key to his photograph insists that the many embedded “hidden” subjects of the image are as crucial to its cumulative meaning as its primary figure, and that all are implicated in the same frame. Lynes’s personal art collection, which included paintings by Cadmus, French, Tchelitchew, Marsden Hartley, Paul Klee, Pierre Roy, Picasso, and Yves Tanguy, also appeared in fashion photographs and nudes, while

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artworks by Lynes’s newest acquaintances—young aspiring commercial or fine artists—were given exposure via their appearances in the backgrounds of advertisements that ran in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar (see figure 8). Though the convention of posing models with works of art was a common trope in fashion photography of the period, Lynes did not merely instrumentalize artworks as backdrops or decoration but integrated them into his compositions as psychological extensions or mirrors of his living subjects.80 By implanting artworks he had made, purchased, borrowed, received, or posed for, Lynes opened up the photograph’s play of significations and continually reintegrated evidence of his own network into the images he sent out into the world. These “cameo” paintings, drawings, and photographs stood in service to a self-referential name-dropping that transformed commercial assignments into coded vehicles of interrelation, but perhaps most importantly, as a way of leaving visible traces of his lived experience.

+  +  +  + Lynes said that his pictures constituted “a future history of art,” yet the majority of his vast body of work has been subject to cursory scrutiny, at best, and appraised under the fallacious premise that sexuality and the meaning of works of art are trans-historically stable and fixed.81 A study of Lynes’s project in its entirety would show its significance to be on par with vastly conceived photographic monuments, such as the portraits of his nineteenth-century predecessor Nadar, James van der Zee’s chronicle of Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, or People of the 20th Century, the album of an entire epoch made by Lynes’s German contemporary, August Sander. Lynes believed himself to be capturing the artists who would one day “be historical” (to recall Gertrude Stein’s ambition), and his wish to be remembered among them is clear from the detailed records he kept of his encounters, the duplicates he made of his vast correspondence, his prescience regarding the need to save his most difficult work from destruction by entrusting it to

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friends and to Kinsey’s institute, and the irrepressible channeling of his photographs through every imaginable mode of exchange and display. Though Lynes’s nudes are now frequently exhibited and reproduced, often in contexts that celebrate LGBTQ+ struggle and progress, his work is granted conditional visibility, chiefly as homoerotica. If the restrictive conditions under which a minority is allowed to make images for a majority culture have shifted since Lynes’s death, the form of what we call progress is no less rigid. The photographer Hal Fisher’s incisive reflection on Lynes’s work regards the images as marked by the limiting conditions under which they were made: Eroticism and sexual desire inform much of Lynes’ photography, even his portraiture and commercial work. Eroticism, however, is never pictured as an overt act but rather as an anticipatory or voyeuristically sensual state. The early photographs, in particular, manifest a kind of situational eroticism; male subjects watch one another, reach and wait . . . .It’s not hard to read estrangement in these photographs. They are metaphors for Lynes’ separateness: from his career, from lovers or whatever else. . . . This condition doesn’t strike me as a failure in Lynes’ art, but as a sad fact of existence: one man’s articulate and tragic response to his personal situation and the society in which he functioned.82

In Fisher’s appreciation, Lynes’s work is inevitably updated by historical context, an effect of what Craig Owens called the “reappropriation and reinterpretation of works of art by each successive generation.”83 Written just months after the first cases of AIDS (then still falsely understood as an epidemic “gay” cancer) were reported in the United States, Fisher’s text resignifies the emotional tenor of Lynes’s images through a lens of acute social alienation. But Fisher also erases Lynes’s standing as a protagonist in the highly interconnected social worlds of 1940s New York—the allegorical dimension of the photographs overwhelms their historical character. Exploring the fullness of the archive, we might now recover the complexity of the actual historical frames in which Lynes’s work was made and

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circulated and received, freed from simplifying narratives such as the melancholy homosexual or the artist who works in secret. The sheer scope and intertextual density of Lynes’s body of work has always welcomed—even demanded—close reading. Regardless of whether or not his photographs could be freely shown to a wider public at the time of their making, they constituted facts of existence. They were made for those closest to him and for those furthest away, the viewers of the future. “Photography,” Lynes wrote, “is going to reform the writing of history and biography in some ways. There are some lies historians will never be able to tell again.”84

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PaJaMa Drama angela miller

Beginning in 1937 and for the next decade and beyond, the artists Paul Cadmus (1904–1999), Jared French (1905–1988), and Margaret Hoening French (1906–1998) spent their summers by the sea, ending each day by going out— as Cadmus later recalled—“when the light was best” to make photographs of one another with a lightweight handheld Leica camera owned by Margaret.1 “They were just playthings. We would hand out these little photographs when we went to dinner parties, like playing cards.”2 These “playing cards” were small in scale—most commonly 6½" × 4½" or less often 6" × 9", 7" × 9", 3" × 4", or 4" × 4"; their moniker “PaJaMa”—formed by the first syllable of the first names of the three collaborators—conjured wholesome pastimes and childhood games—“just playthings.”3 Such allusions to games and play, however, combine spontaneity and fun with rule-bound procedures; individual personalities with group identity; childlike antics with very adult negotiations, carried out in bedrooms. Wintering in New York, the three principals, along with friends and associates, rented cottages in the summer, on Fire Island, in Provincetown, and on Nantucket.4 Joining the trio at various points in their photographic play throughout these years was the artist George Tooker, who entered the circle in 1946 when Paul and he became lovers; the writer Glenway Wescott

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and his life partner, Monroe Wheeler; Fidelma Kirstein (née Cadmus) and her husband, Lincoln Kirstein—friend, mentor, and patron of many in the group—along with a shifting field of friends and visitors. Of this group, George Platt Lynes—although not part of the PaJaMa collaboration—was already a well-known photographer; he brought a Rolleiflex, which he used to take photographs on Fire Island weekends.5 His social and artistic world would interweave with theirs, mutually shaped by the practice of staging photographs of themselves and one another, a practice that spilled over into Lynes’s work as a professional studio photographer. Never intended for exhibition or sale, the photographs made by PaJaMa circulated privately among this network.6 As Cadmus recalled, “Of course, we never thought of this work as being sellable. Those photos were meant to be tokens of friendship . . . They were essentially family photographs.”7 But they were family photographs of a particularly revealing nature, falling well outside accepted definitions of that institution in the years around and following World War II. The three PaJaMa principals were part of a queer network that experimented with new forms of private life enacted in daily exchanges, and issuing in new collaborative practices. Their shifting romantic and emotional alignments resisted the ostensibly stable pairings expected of heterosexual couplings. Jared French was sexually drawn to both men and women; others in the group were also not bound by the socially enforced containment of sexual desire to the nuclear family. These experiments all took shape in a decade most often understood through the figure of the autonomous cisgender male creator, most fully realized in the white Abstract Expressionist painter of the New York School that took shape in the following decade. Turning away from the pursuit of heroic individuality, PaJaMa created a vivid new language of intimate social performance centered around their ménage à trois, and acted out within a sympathetically responsive natural world. To more fully understand these enigmatic images, we need first to abandon the idea that the three collaborators were making “art.” Or indeed that

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they were making photographs in the conventional sense: creating objects that exist separately from their makers, and that sit neatly within the existing genres that allowed them to communicate with their audiences through a shared aesthetic language. Instead of creating works in which meaningmaking begins once the photograph leaves the darkroom, their practice placed as much if not more importance on the act of staging and shooting the photographs, bringing into focus the often challenging realities of their everyday worlds. Their performed actions, rather than expressing anterior emotions, actively scripted the raw material of their shared lives. The photographs they made were the trace, or record, of this collective process. In “Paul Cadmus and Jared French, Fire Island,” the two men face each other, Paul’s back to us as he looks at Jared emerging from the waves. The photograph was probably taken by Margaret, although staged collaboratively. A dried and leafless tree—planted in the sand as a prop—acts as a scrim through which we see Paul’s body. Its extended branches connect earth to sky like nerve ends. The scrim of branches brackets the delicate swells of Paul’s back and his shadowed buttocks, crossing at a point “just above the buttocks.” The words are those of the English writer and close friend of the group E. M. Forster, who recounted the experience as a young man of being touched there by a “comrade.” “The sensation was unusual, and I still remember it . . . as much psychological as physical. . . . [going] straight through the small of my back . . . without involving any thoughts,” activating the energy fields of the body—in Forster’s compressed account— and linking these to sexual self-knowledge and to creative conception. Forster’s account resonates with the private symbolism of PaJaMa, and evokes a world of ideas in which bodies, sexuality, nature, and friendship between men were harmoniously webbed together.8 As this image suggests, in nearly every way, the photographs made by this “family” of three collaborators departed from the established genres, medium-specific qualities, and social discourses of photography in these

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Figure 23.  Paul Cadmus and Jared French, Fire Island. 1941. Vintage silver print. 9 ¼ × 6 ⅛ in. Photograph by Margaret French. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York.

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years. Hybrid in nature—recalling photographic stagings or tableaux vivants—they have until recently remained marginal to histories of that medium.9 Playfully unbound by the conventions of photography, the three PaJaMa principals staged their photographs without reference to the market and gallery system in which photography had increasingly come to operate. This left them freer to experiment. Preoccupied with another medium— painting—they brought their eye for composition and formal configuration to their photography. And to their camera play were added elements of psychological enactment and formal experimentation that enriched and complicated the “family album” they made together, and found its way into the paintings. Such hybrid forms integrating play with the serious business of living together in unconventional ways resonate with contemporary practices, bringing these enigmatic images into clearer focus in relation to the present moment. Suggesting frozen time, these images resisted the fleeting and momentary—qualities that linked photography as a medium to modernity. The three artists did shoot snapshots—informal images of their antics. But they distinguished snapshots from their preferred practice of collaborative staging; they favored direction and planning over fortuitous encounters or “the decisive moment” seized out of the flow of time. Their photographs were built around mysterious scenarios in which individuals enact emotional dynamics or perform symbolically charged actions. As these images emerged slowly into public view beginning in the 1970s, critics were stumped. They offered “few insights into their sitters’ characters . . . ,” as one critic put it, relinquishing the peculiar power of the medium to probe the psychology of the photographic subject.10 In place of the “truth value” of the photographic index—mirroring the real—these images presented a highly choreographed “theater” of everyday life. Queer visitors to an island still largely serving the heteronormative families who summered there, PaJaMa arranged their enigmatic scenarios within the gentle turbulence and

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flux of nature. Rather than constituting a world apart from the human, sand, sea, scrub brush, and driftwood play a key role as scene, revealing the occult alignments of human and natural elements and the synergies uniting the two. PaJaMa’s work established a distinctly different use of photography in two further ways. Dismissing the auteur function of the fine arts photographer, they borrowed knowingly from popular media, bending it to their own playfully ironic uses. PaJaMa’s staginess at times approaches camp, a style of artifice, irony, and performative excess associated with queer subcultures from the early twentieth century forward. At a time when photographers were working to establish the high modernist weight of their enterprise, PaJaMa borrowed from such popular forms as film and melodrama. Next to the moral and formal gravity of US photographic genres such as documentary, portraiture, and studio still lifes, PaJaMa photographs drew from a range of period-specific visual languages in ways that suggest parody, appropriation, and promiscuous genre mixing.11 Another departure from photography’s past was the collaborative process that generated PaJaMa’s body of work. All three principals of PaJaMa remained committed to collaboration, rendering the question of who actually clicked the shutter somewhat irrelevant.12 Their works represented not a singular creative personality but a composite of three; the very name “PaJaMa” was meta-authorial, designating the entangled identities of the three artists whose lives formed the substance and structure of the photographs themselves, and whose creative selves were absorbed into a larger entity. But each of the three had a specific role to play, whose implicit terms and restrictions they each understood. When Cadmus referred to the photographs as “playthings,” he may also have had in mind the idea of a game, conducted according to certain rules and terms of engagement that each of the three collaborators implicitly accepted. These terms eclipsed the personal or purely internal motivations of the singular creative individual

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working alone. Collaboration—while freeing Paul, Jared, and Margaret from the pressures imposed by individual creative selfhood—imposed certain constraints, demanding daily negotiations and exposing each of the three to the vagrant moods and ambivalent desires of their creative partners, who were also their sexual and emotional intimates.13 Even while generating other possibilities, these ever-varied conditions could undermine their own needs and preferences. But while they gave up some of their own individual agency as artists, their collaborative staging expanded their control over photography itself, substituting mise-en-scène for the unplanned intrusions into the photographic field. As a process, collaboration mirrored the content of their photographs: the interactive performance of private worlds within a queer network.

+  +  +  + PaJaMa’s production falls into several broad bodies of work. The first consists of the collaborative photographs the three made on the beaches of Fire Island, Nantucket, and Provincetown. Fire Island offered direct inspiration, with its sun and sand dunes, its special qualities of light—what artist and friend Bernard Perlin called its “haze of brightness” and its “marvelous . . . strange timelessness.”14 Fire Island’s stark absence of distracting elements opened a space for their mysterious antics—an alphabet of poses, enacted emotions, and props such as driftwood, framed against the movements of sea and sand. A second body of images consists of more informal, exploratory photographic studies, many of which were never printed beyond the contact sheet. These provide a record of source material used by the three collaborators, revealing as well their experimental, improvisatory nature. The contact prints also preserve the sequence of photographs as they were made—and therefore the context—which the final printed images, circulated to friends, have lost. A third group includes travel photographs, many taken in Italy during two trips there, in 1949 and in 1951–53. According to Cadmus,

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however, these also were posed: “almost none of what you’d call impromptu shots. . . . ”15 Another group consists of snapshots of members of the network in social situations, and photographs taken by one of the three principals in isolation from the others, such as subjects posed—both nude and clothed—in interiors. A final group consists of photographs made in color, a few of which are reproduced in the only publication of works by PaJaMa.16 Some among this group show clear evidence of darkroom manipulation during the development process in the burning out of the background. One subset of PaJaMa photographs may be linked to specific paintings; a photograph of the dancer José Martinez—Kirstein’s live-in lover following his marriage to Fidelma—stands astride the prostrate form of Paul Cadmus, enacting poses and attitudes that French would incorporate into his painting Murder (1942).17 A Fire Island image of Martinez relates directly to Cadmus’s painting Point O View, and many more photographs are linked to paintings. Four images of French in the shower, mounted onto an album page (c. 1940) appear to be studies for Cadmus’s painting The Shower (1943), a wan scenario of deflected desire as it circulates among the three figures.18 Two men and a woman shower, slump languidly, and stand, insulated from one another, their gazes downcast or not returned. The two men seem inwardly focused, the statuesque woman isolated from them like a caryatid. The fragility of their bonds—stretched taut like the ropes behind the woman—is implied by the broken circuit of their gazes. The wind-whipped soapsuds that spill off the body of the central figure rhyme with the foam of waves breaking on the beach and the swirling clouds through which a faded red sun burns its way, while also evoking the unspoken desire between the two men. Their very immobility suspends erotic tensions that are displaced onto the suds, delicate grasses, and timeworn wood surrounding the figures. Much of the PaJaMa production has no such links to painting, however. The suprapersonal, remote, and static qualities of the paintings differ distinctly from the tense and shifting grounds of the photographs, which,

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Figure 24.  “Jared French,” Glenway Wescott and Monroe Wheeler album, with annotations in blue ink by Wescott. c. 1940. Vintage silver prints. Various dimensions. Courtesy of Keith de Lellis Gallery.

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Figure 25.  Paul Cadmus, The Shower. 1943. Tempera on panel. 15¼ × 15½ in. Collection of John Axelrod. Photo credit: Ron Cowie / Oyster Farm Productions.

however, restore context and depth to the suggestively coded narratives enacted in the paintings. Since so many of the photographs don’t correspond to any paintings, we should resist assigning creative priority or significance to one or the other.

+  +  +  +

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What motivated these three collaborators—all painters—to choose photography, along with their particular methods of staging and their choice of scenic backdrop? How did they communicate to the broader network of queer and bisexual artists, writers, photographers, models, and dancers—through what coyly shared secrets, circuits of gossip and innuendo, or playful allusion?19 Since their work was never exhibited beyond the social network in which they circulated, anyone outside the circle—and not already initiated into their private worlds—would have encountered a hermetic, even secretive language. Like older daguerreotypes, these discreetly stylized photographs, gifted to others, were imbued with private, sometimes coded intimacies.20 To answer this question, we need to look into the intertwined private lives of the three PaJaMa principals. In a letter to his friend George Platt Lynes in 1946, Paul Cadmus enclosed summer photos from Nantucket. “They tell, so much better than I could, something about our summer.”21 These images told stories that could not be captured in either snapshots of everyday life or in words. PaJaMa’s stories had to be conveyed instead through the expressive language of the body: through pose, gesture, expression, gaze, attitude, and spatial intervals; through props; and through dramatic stagings. Everyday life involved delicate negotiations among three people, driven by a complex alchemy of love, desire, longing, resentment, and envy. The language they evolved together to express this dynamic had to give form to these volatile emotions, endowing them with aesthetic structure while preserving their tense internal life. Paul Cadmus’s emotional and sexual connection with Jared French, dating back to 1929, remained deep-seated following Jared’s marriage to Margaret in 1937. Margaret’s attachment to her husband—grounded in sexual and emotional intimacy with a man who was by several accounts highly reserved and at times inflexible—was lifelong. Coming from a moneyed New Jersey family, she was also able to extend financial support to Jared. And as

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the love object of both Margaret and Paul, Jared must have felt pulled between the two. Following his marriage to Margaret, a friend of the group reported that Jared “did not like Paul’s involvement with other men and was jealous and possessive.”22 Margaret’s marriage to Jared had painfully—if only temporarily—breached their bond; she witnessed daily the attraction between the two men. Always wary of their pull toward one another, she must also have felt both competition with and resentment toward Paul, with whom she was compelled by the very terms of their unspoken contract to share Jared’s affections. Margaret may also have felt some misplaced desire for Paul himself, as hinted at in certain scenarios; she and Paul in turn would embark on a loving if guarded friendship in the face of their mutual longing and desire for the same man. Paul’s desire for Jared likewise caused emotional disruption as he was forced to witness his lover’s marriage to Margaret.23 These were the lived conditions that set the terms for many of the photographs they made together. PaJaMa’s daily ritual of posing and staging photographs on the beach became a way of formalizing the emotional undercurrents of their lives. PaJaMa’s photographs unfold within a natural setting in which the starkness of sand and vegetation generates the conditions for emotional exposure. There are few “safe spaces” here: in this world we witness tense standoffs, where vulnerability is linked to emotional distrust and defensiveness, while also capturing the elusive ties binding the three to one another. Enacting this complex and shifting emotional terrain was one primary motive for making the photographs themselves, a daily routine that consecrated the ongoing challenge of renewing and reinventing their fragile and continually tested family bonds, as well as a means of directing the real-life emotions generated by their shared lives into the realm of image-making. Their collaborative practice was an activity whose rules each one understood, helping to cement ties constantly threatened from within, and anchoring their fluid domestic and sexual arrangements. Committed to one another, they

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acted out in the symbolic arena of these photographs the complex imbrication of respect, friendship, love, desire, and financial need that brought them all together. Jared in turn would channel his own sexual ambivalence and conflicted selfhood into paintings in which the jealousies and resentments that brewed just below the surface of their world would find a stylized and controlled choreography. In a 1944 photograph, “Margaret and Paul, Fire Island,” Margaret and Paul stand in a latticework of light and shadow, a study in tense deflection. The two—both in profile—face off in a carefully composed study in symmetry. Margaret’s expression is one of strained intensity. Her sunlit face is framed against a shadowed wall; Paul’s shadowed face is framed against a sunlit wall at right angles (see figure 1). In a photograph owned by Lincoln Kirstein—“Fidelma, Margaret, and Paul”—Paul’s lowered eyes signal the shaming or silencing power of Margaret’s gaze, suggesting a withering judgment on him. Here and elsewhere, Margaret’s role is expressed through her commanding gaze, conveying both appraisal and warning. As the central focus of these dramas of jealousy and longing, Jared appeared less frequently alongside the other two: almost never with Paul and more often with Margaret. In a 1946 photograph, Jared towers over three miniature lay figures hung from a horizontal rope stretched across a room whose dimensions are unseen. The camera angle is low, pointed up toward his foreshortened and menacing presence, looming over the segmented and inorganic figures like a commanding master magician or puppeteer. Here the drama of personal lives is reduced to the base terms of power and helplessness. The image renders into explicit terms power dynamics only suggested by other photographs of the three. Jared’s position as a pivot around which Paul’s and Margaret’s romantic and sexual lives turned is mirrored in the placement of his name between the other two (PaJaMa). Standing at the fulcrum of two symmetrical relationships—one with Margaret and one with Paul—Jared commanded more than his share of emotional authority within

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Figure 26.  Fidelma, Margaret, and Paul. 1940s. 4 5/16 × 6 ½ in. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Gift of Lincoln Kirstein 1985. Image source: Art Resource, NY.

the triad, and his photographic staging embodies his structural position. One of the figures throws its arms over its head, as if to express a loss of control. One lay figure is isolated from the other two.24 Performing his assertive presence on camera, Jared elsewhere cast his two collaborators into complementary roles, alternately vulnerable, codependent, filled with jealousy, defiant, or pliant in the face of the circumstances—or rules of the game— within which their lives unfolded. “Paul Cadmus and Margaret French, Provincetown” is one of a broader series of related photographs in which presence and shadow, light and dark, black and white appear in stark contrast within the same frame, as carefully constructed studies in mirroring. Done in Provincetown in 1947—late in PaJaMa’s history—they were most likely staged by Jared, evoking the shadow selves that preoccupied him as a painter exploring Jungian ideas turning on

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Figure 27.  Jared French, New York City. c. 1946. Vintage silver print. 5 × 6 ⅞ in. Photograph by Paul Cadmus. Courtesy of Keith de Lellis Gallery.

the doubled self of anima and animus. This theme of shadowing is color coded, featuring Margaret and Paul in matching black and white hoodies, the two merging into a singular—if stuttered—expression of the self. Their willingness to lend themselves to Jared’s private drama of the psyche is striking, and suggests an asymmetry in the collaborative process. But this asymmetry sat with greater force on the female member of the circle; Margaret’s symbolic weight within the photographs, and her power as witness, took shape within an interpersonal environment in which she was often a bystander in men’s worlds. Although she occupies a commanding visual position within many of these photographs, she was structurally bound by the “terms of engagement” to remain symbol rather than agent of action. Paul, as his symbolically subordinate position within figure 26 implies, was likewise bound within the rules of the game

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Figure 28.  Margaret French and Paul Cadmus, Provincetown. c. 1947. Vintage silver print. 5 × 7 in. Photograph by Jared French. Courtesy of Keith de Lellis Gallery.

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all three had presumably agreed to. Doubling as object of the camera’s gaze and more rarely as agent behind the camera, he occupied a liminal zone. But the precise mix of elements—the three actors; the act of staging itself; and the ever-changing scene of dunes, natural light, and inventive props—remained impossible to script precisely. Despite their efforts, there was always an element of chance—and risk—at work. Recognizing how entwined and interdependent they were, the three PaJaMa principals set into motion an emergent understanding of how actions—physical and symbolic—actively constituted new social arrangements and truths, emerging in the spaces between individuals. The subjective truths of their individual lives were not internally grounded apart from their context but instead were the result of certain actions occurring among the three.25 The “work” of photography—as they used the medium—was thus to enact an intersubjective arena of experience and feeling through collaborative role-playing. Contemporaneous concepts of self-expression grounded authenticity in interiority—a realm redefined over the course of the twentieth century as variously situated in the presocial psyche, or in a gendered sense of militant individuality on guard against the incursions of an ever more bureaucratized social world.26 PaJaMa’s collaborative process represented a movement toward new forms of social selfhood and understanding. Refusing the usual channels of public exhibition and circulation open to others who turned to photography in these years, they repurposed photography as a medium of group expression. Free to borrow and mix visual genres in their contrived scenarios, they also reinvented older forms such as the family album. Their works reference a homoerotic tradition of the male nude and occasionally recall older Pictorialist staged photographs.27 Refusing to settle into any singular aesthetic expression, these photographs also recall the stylized effects, dramatic lighting, and taut psychological charge of 1940s Hollywood film noir and melodrama.

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“George Tooker, Margaret French, and Paul Cadmus, Provincetown” positions the youthful Tooker, lit from below, above Margaret, her dark profile in full shadow against a starkly lit stairway. Near the lower margin a cutout of Paul’s face has been superimposed. No darkroom trickery here, yet the superimposition of Paul’s image is like a haunted projection from the minds of the two main figures. In one of a series of photographs staged in Margaret’s family home in New Jersey, Jared is shot from below in heavily shadowed lighting, leaning over the balustrade of a gothic stairwell. The camera angle forces the perspective, making Jared seem both smaller and at the same time more threatening. Here and elsewhere, PaJaMa’s stagings recall the contemporaneous psychological dramas of Alfred Hitchcock in the early 1940s such as Suspicion (1941) and Shadow of a Doubt (1943). Among the most overtly dramatic of the series is one of Margaret—sunbronzed and facing the camera—framed by a rough wooden structure against which she leans as she grips one support, casting her face down, eyes closed. Behind her, back to the viewer, is Jared, head down as if in dejection. The perspective is tilted, and the horizon high in the composition, against a ridge of breaking waves and dark sky. Here as elsewhere, the rhetoric of light and shadow is exaggerated to emphasize formal relationships while accentuating the drama of isolation and tense interaction. Their emotional distances are measured by spatial intervals and by the indirection of their postures and gazes, framed against the backdrop of ocean. The weather-beaten architecture of sagging stairs and posts further adds to the mood, as does the bare ground that separates them. Such images hyperbolically express their real-life dramas, now mediated through a cinematic lens. Appropriating the look of popular genres, these images dramatically enact volatile passions. PaJaMa’s role-playing channeled the psychological violence lurking within such genres as film noir and melodrama. In the absence of a fuller understanding of their contexts, critics have consigned PaJaMa to a kind of generic surrealism.28 Indeed, their later pho-

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Figure 29.  George Tooker, Margaret French, and Paul Cadmus, Provincetown. 1947. Vintage silver print. 6 ⅞ × 5 in. Courtesy of Gitterman Gallery.

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Figure 30.  Jared French in Margaret Hoening family home, New Jersey. “Collection of Jon Anderson” on the back. Courtesy of Keith de Lellis Gallery.

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Figure 31.  Margaret French and Jared French, Nantucket. 1946. Vintage silver print. 6 ⅜ × 4 ⅜ in. Photograph by Paul Cadmus. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York.

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Figure 32.  Margaret French, Fire Island. c. 1944. Vintage silver print. 4 ¼ × 6 ½ in. Photograph by Jared French. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York.

tographs do employ quasi-dreamlike scenarios and scale distortions to create a sense of uncanniness that recalls Salvador Dalí, by then a well-known visual reference in the United States.29 Only here, those uncanny effects come not from manipulation of the negative during processing, such as double exposure or other darkroom procedures, but from staging. A photograph from 1944 pointedly riffs on Dalí: Margaret’s form, shrouded in blindingly white fabric, faces seaward, intersecting the horizon. Though spatially close to the viewer, she appears distant, overshadowed by a massive, sculpturally tangled piece of driftwood. Its uncannily animate form, burnished by wind and sea, seems like some monstrous projection of Margaret’s imagination. Exposed to the elements, its parts appear locked in an internal struggle emerging out of its shadowy interior. Posed against an empty coastal stretch of sun-bleached sand, these two elements relate to one another in mysteri-

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ous ways. Placed together, they activate the narrative imagination without prescribing any singular content. (See also figures 15 through 17.) Other photographs made around the same time also engage such Daliesque elements. In a related image, the eerily tall figure of Margaret— once again draped in white but now standing upright, her figure silhouetted against the sky—appears in the distance; her striped parasol is planted in the sand—suggesting challenge or summons—while Paul or Jared lies prone on the sand, back to us, his body parallel to the horizon.30 The image engages scale distortions, as the parasol in the foreground appears much larger than the distant figure of Margaret. And yet in both physical and psychological terms, she is an overpowering presence. The parasol reappears in a number of photographs from this time, both a striking formal and design element and a talisman, in the anthropological sense—an object standing in for and representing the power of the person of which it is the symbol. Associated with Margaret, it carries a potency stemming from her place within the ménage. Her tall, draped figure on the horizon resembles an ancient idol. In turning to such sources as Dalí, however playfully, PaJaMa may also have been referencing the unconscious processes first named by Freud, and explicitly engaged by Surrealism itself: processes of projection, displacement, condensation, and substitution.31 These were fundamental to understanding the operations of desire, a central force with which PaJaMa daily reckoned, and which their photographs channeled. Found objects such as props (driftwood, nets, and ropes) and objects that act as substitutions for people (the striped parasol) functioned as trip wires for subliminal processes, infusing the images with elements of anxiety, even threat. Toying with these Freudian tropes for the role of the unconscious, PaJaMa stagings treated them with characteristic humor and indirection. Part of the enigma of these works—photographs and paintings both—is that we do not know what we are seeing or where these scenes are situated within a narrative or a structure of motivations. Instead of unconscious

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processes, they rely on the ways in which conscious interpersonal and intersubjective bonds between people play out. PaJaMa’s role was to set the stage, leaving open the manner in which actions unfolded. The difference from Surrealism is noteworthy; Surrealism offered a tangled and displaced economy of motives, exposed by the accidental, irrational, and dreamlike symptoms of unconscious processes originating in the psyche. But the photographs and paintings made by PaJaMa’s extended circle operate according to a different logic of interpersonal exchange. Surrealism was only one of many sources their collaboration engaged as they knowingly borrowed from the popular image worlds of the early 1940s, from film to upscale advertising to the psychological suggestiveness of “magic realism.” Of equal importance was their respect for the gravity of the classical language of the poised, silhouetted body as a measure of time stilled and of beauty seized from the tempest of the present. PaJaMa departed from the staged studio photography of the nude or seminude male body—current in these years—in significant ways, above all by incorporating the element of a story. In an essay on the photographer George Platt Lynes, Glenway Wescott complained about the pedestrian photographs made between the war of “thousands of young men striking Greek or German attitudes, and young women pretending to be asleep .  .  . in make-believe moonlight.  .  .  . ” Wescott asked: why “[m]ust photography always be just a bit of this and a bit of that, one photograph at a time ad infinitum, with . . . no point of view at all, no logic, no plot?” (emphasis mine).32 Written in 1939, Wescott’s essay on Lynes may have been informed by his early knowledge of PaJaMa photographs, which he would collect and assemble into an album. Linking this knowledge with Lynes’s own early experiments with mythic scenarios, Wescott’s essay points to the commonalities between PaJaMa and Lynes. The idea of plot and plotting surfaces explicitly in a letter Lynes wrote to Margaret French on July 18, 1946. Thanking her for a group of PaJaMa photos she gifted to Lynes—done on Fire Island—he writes,

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Figure 33.  Staging of a scene, with Jared French, Glenway Wescott, and others. c. 1941. Vintage silver print. 8 × 10 in. Courtesy of Keith de Lellis Gallery.

“The photos, of course, are wonderful and frightening and make (or ought to make) plot Why don’t you—all get a movie camera and really go to work? Make a so-called psychological thriller . . . Send me sometime an assortment of the best old Fire Island shots, to replace those I scattered. . . . ”33 Lynes’s canny characterization of the photographs captures the way in which they suggest a sequence of events or actions—a plot—out of which their frozen scenarios have been wrested.34 Lynes would incorporate elements of such plotting in his own work. Plots require planning, or—in line with Lynes’s allusion to cinema— directing.35 One photograph in particular gives a behind-the-scenes glimpse

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of the manner in which PaJaMa photographs were staged—using props, posing, and scenery—to conjure the sense of a story, however mysterious. Jared—who is directing the photograph—bends over one of three “actors” in the scene he is arranging. A heavy braided rope and a cable spool—both props found elsewhere in their photographs—are arranged to play their part in the drama. A culminating image—if such it was—is less than convincing, as Cadmus and Wescott smile down at the prostrate figure of Lynes, as if giving up on the fiction of the tragic death of a beautiful young man. The poses, compositions, dramatic scenarios, and narrative elements that recur throughout the PaJaMa photographs imply just such a series of stories—sometimes mythic— that give structure and meaning to their quotidian worlds. Precariously placed at the boundary between art and life, fiction and reality, PaJaMa photographs functioned as a form of symbolic action, directed at the difficult negotiations transpiring among members of the group. Directed by whoever was behind the camera, but also working collaboratively, the three assumed and held a variety of poses and “attitudes.” Language philosopher and literary theorist Kenneth Burke (1897–1993) is discussed further below; his notion of “attitude” captures how physical expression—snarling, clenched fists, crossed arms, or “heavy limpness”— constituted a form of nonverbal rhetoric. Enacting a range of associated attitudes induced a heightened awareness of reflexive everyday actions: gestures and movements that exposed a shifting field of defensiveness, anger, hate, love, desire, childlike regression, resignation, voyeuristic curiosity, and the intimate tug-of-war between control and submission.36 Physical enactment channeled and contained emotions—trapped within the potentially unruly realm of the body—that lacked productive outlets.37 PaJaMa’s experiments in living unfolded within the very heart of a culture in which the value of selfhood was measured by one’s freedom from dependence on others. In role-playing, the performance of poses and roles on

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camera was bound by rules (however loosely defined) that constrained and moderated the private obsessions and motivations of the individual by playing these out within an external arena of other selves. The individual subject—dissolved under the force of the collaborative contract—was drawn into a circuit of emotions among the actors. Psychological energy was situated not in the inner worlds of the actors but in the spaces between them: a new intersubjective understanding about how selves were constituted that posed an alternative to prevalent cultural mythologies of the autonomous self.

+  +  +  + Central to PaJaMa’s varied production is a poised statuesque stillness of the figures as they assume poses within the frame of the image. The effect is to suspend not only movement but also the energies driving such movement, creating a tableau-like effect of immobility. This “aesthetic of immobility” countered the medium-specific possibilities of photography in fundamental ways, turning it against itself to create a sense of time stilled. Unlike stopaction photography—which froze a moment captured out of the unbroken flow of time—these photographs do not arrest motion. Instead, they involve a suspension of time, removing everyday actions from their place within a naturalized temporal flow. Many of the PaJaMa images suggest a lack of communication among the figures in the frame, adding to the strange sense of suspended time that haunts these scenarios. PaJaMa’s references to sculpture further distance these images from the fleeting nature of modern temporality. What the critic Eleanor Munro at the time called the “dervish world” of perpetual “motion and direction” challenged the artists around PaJaMa who felt trapped by the impermanence of art forms based in sensory experience and the flux of perception, such as those driven by the impressionist effects of evanescent light.38 Developing a figural style of classical balance drained of movement, they shared such qualities with other artists denominated “symbolic realists” by Lincoln

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Kirstein.39 The nudity or partial nudity of the figures, as well as the shrouding that wraps them—generalizing their forms—suggests as well a timelocked quality remote from modernity, recalling the Hellenic world so strongly associated with the homoeroticism of ancient Greece. These images realize their greatest force when their meanings are most indeterminate. Conversely, they lose their aesthetic power when they veer toward readability or programmatic meaning. In one of the most reproduced of the small number of published PaJaMa photographs, George Tooker, Jared French, and Monroe Wheeler arrange themselves in statuesque poses on the beach of Provincetown as they turn away from one another in the stillness of their thoughts. Tooker—wearing a chiton-like white drapery—gazes toward the earth, while French, facing away from us, looks toward the sea. Wheeler lies on the sand, propped on his arms. Organizing these figures in relation to one another is a piece of found driftwood, introducing a sinuous silhouette and an architectonic balance of horizontal and vertical elements. The central vertical form with its small headlike spur and extended arms conjures an abstracted totem-like form of commanding presence, around which the three orient themselves. Posed against the stark landscape of sand, sea, and sky, their figures elegantly transect these layers. The photograph also recalls a neoclassical pose that had taken shape in the years between the wars and that drew on a longstanding dream of the ancient Mediterranean. The vogue for posing in the attitudes of Greek gods or performing in poses plastiques as classical statues was widespread from the late nineteenth century forward; as late as the 1920s, the dancer Ted Shawn posed as Apollo.40 An immediate source for the aesthetic of this particular image was the work of the German photographer Herbert List, a master of the homoerotic nude framed in the timeless world of the Greek islands. PaJaMa’s evocation of an ancient Mediterranean idyll of statuesque stillness— staged on the beaches of the North Atlantic—referenced such photographs of List as Youths (1937), done on the island of Naxos.

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Figure 34.  George Tooker, Jared French, and Monroe Wheeler, 1947. Vintage silver print. 6 ¼ × 4 ⅛ in. Photograph by Paul Cadmus. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York.

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Figure 35.  Herbert List, Greece, Cyclades, island of Naxos. Youths. 1937. Vintage silver print. © Herbert List / Magnum Photos.

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List’s fictional self Joachim, in Stephen Spender’s The Temple—an autobiographical novel inspired by his interwar experiences in the homosexual circle of List—is characterized by his friend Paul as preferring “to be with living statues of flesh and blood” rather than making them out of marble. The beautiful boys Joachim pursues do indeed resemble statues in their dynamic unity.41 List’s photographs shared with PaJaMa’s the quality of beauty immobilized, of living statues embodying the complex flow of energy fusing muscle and flesh. Along with their shared aesthetic of statuesque immobility, a number of other overlapping themes connect List’s slightly earlier work to PaJaMa’s. Staging and the use of symbolic props and studio lay figures; contrasting dark and light compositions; mirror images; and draped or shrouded figures are found in both bodies of work. The PaJaMa image was made almost a decade later than List’s work. Dominating the composition, the driftwood at the center of this image invokes totemic or archaic forces running below the refined classicism of the figures. The driftwood totem also strikes a note of uncanniness, its lively shapes and sinuous contours conjuring life energies— animating the inorganic—in relation to the stillness and suspension of motion of the figures themselves.42 Instead of art emulating life, these images enact moments in which life comes more and more to resemble art. In a recurrent motif within PaJaMa, embodied energies are petrified and figures metaphorically turned to stone. A 1939 photograph in the Wescott album shows the writer standing side by side with another man whose back is turned to the camera; both are draped in a light-colored sheet, which brings them together in a creased monochrome that seems to turn them into statues.43 Only Wescott’s head—emerging from the sheet—establishes a boundary between the living, breathing man and the statue he seems to have become. In a related photograph in the album, Wescott flings off the sheet and emerges, his body silhouetted against the light, legs and arms spread in a

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Figure 36.  Glenway Wescott and draped figure, Fire Island. c. 1940. Vintage silver print. 5 × 6 ⅞ in. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York.

pose of triumph. These works play along the flickering boundary between the animate and the inanimate. They engage the trope of flesh turned to stone, in which mobile human energies are frozen by art, while also referencing the Pygmalion story of the statue touched into life.44 Stone turned into flesh, or flesh turned back into stone: where are we in the cyclical enactment of life into art, and art into life? This ambiguity—structuring much of the work done by PaJaMa and their network of associates—resolves into a broader question about art’s relationship to life. The disruptive pulse of sexual and life energies that circulated through this network of artists had to be both honored and given a controlling form. The aesthetic of immobility balanced on this difficult tension.

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Figure 37.  Jared, Margaret, and Paul (in shadow, taking photograph) Nantucket. 1946. Vintage silver print. 5 × 6 ⅞ in. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York.

The immobility of the actors in PaJaMa’s work (as well as in associated paintings) is, however, only one half of the taut dynamic of these images; its scenic obverse is a landscape of windblown grasses, shifting dunes, expressively twisted driftwood, and turbulent surf crashing upon the beach. All these elements animate the calculated intervals between the figures, playing on the contrast between human actors—locked into their rigid spatial frames—and the scene of nature, with its transitory weather patterns, fugitive atmospheric conditions, and pounding surf. The group stagings exploited the variety of landscapes on Fire Island, from exposure to sheltering, covelike spaces where members of the circle stretched out on the sand—curled up fetus-like—or dallied and loafed. Such moments offered refuge from the insecurities of their shared lives: bodies

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cradle together or are cradled in the sinuous lines of windblasted driftwood, and friends and lovers bend into one another. In others, open sea frames glistening bodies or is filled with a brooding uncertainty. Scenic elements— abandoned or storm- damaged houses; corncribs, doorways, and windows marking boundaries—set the tone for a range of encounters. These carry nearly as much prominence as the figural scenarios acted out within them, implying the ways in which human agency is conditioned by the flux of natural energies within which such actions unfold.

+  +  +  + Writing in the same years as PaJaMa was making photographs, Kenneth Burke saw language and other forms of communication as types of “symbolic action.”45 How we interpret what words mean was radically dependent on their situatedness in social, psychological, political, legal, and religious frameworks. Meaning was thus relative to context; it emerged out of specific forms of experience that shaped underlying motivations. Burke also understood symbolic action as having a dramatistic function—grounded, like drama itself, in conflicting motivations (whether conscious or otherwise) around which humans organized their exchanges with one another and around which they came to understand their world. Symbolic actions for Burke included literary forms, legal documents, and religious treatises; indeed, thinking itself was always motivated, its outcomes realized by concrete actions in the world. Rooted in the analysis of language and rhetoric, Burke’s theories productively apply to staged photographs as a visual form with a narrative basis. PaJaMa used actions to tell a story.46 Embodied movement and physical attitude, framed within a specific scene or setting, represented forms of symbolic action that revealed underlying motivations. Performed by human actors, symbolic action was fundamental to structures of visual narrative going back to the origins of academic theory in the Renaissance. But Burke

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refocused attention on other elements in addition to the human actors. He devised what he called a “grammar of motives”—a group of five basic terms, or the “pentad”—each of which generated different understandings of the motivational structure informing any act of expression or structure of belief. Burke’s dramatistic pentad—agent/agency/act/purpose/scene—represents five variables whose shifting importance helps us interpret the meaning of particular forms of symbolic action. An alteration in one would change the values assigned to the other four terms. How, then, might Burke’s pentad map onto the works of PaJaMa? The actor(s) driving the action, or agent(s), in Burke’s terms, were the three principals working together to make these images; agency refers to the particular instrument of the action, which in this case is the medium of photography itself. For act, we can assign the collaborative method of staging that the three agents used to make their images. Scene refers to the setting or context in which the action occurs—in this case, the windswept dunes of the northern Atlantic coastline, and more broadly, the complicated interpersonal arrangements taking shape within this landscape.47 The actions performed by PaJaMa’s stagings take shape within a scene of both natural and interpersonal flux, in which the ground of human relationships is forever shifting and provisional. Focusing on the “scene” as an element within these images offers a commentary on the relative importance of nature, the environment, and the social context within which individual lives unfold. The greater the focus on scene, the less weight is given to individual agents and purposive actions. But sometimes, scene, agent, and act blend together to generate an interpretation of the balance between human and natural worlds. In a photograph by Jared of Paul, Margaret, and the painter Bernard Perlin on Fire Island, dated 1938, the three friends are placed at even intervals within the staged image. Margaret is framed within the space formed by a high wooden pole and a heavy corded rope that she extends to create a triangular shape. In compositional terms, she is a primary agent in the image;

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her act of form-making helps organize the triangulated arrangement of the three figures in space, and indeed guides us toward a particular interpretation involving triangulated shapes and relationships. Perlin—farthest away— forms the point of this larger triangular shape mapped in depth, whose apex is the tall pole. These elegantly organized shapes and spatial intervals are repeated elsewhere in the image. In the distance, a series of telegraph posts punctuate the lateral expanse of the horizon, rhyming with the spatial intervals between the figures along the image’s axis of depth. Car or dune buggy tracks traced along the ground connect distance with staged foreground. These human and technological marks upon the land chart and measure the open, undifferentiated natural expanse of the island with mathematical precision.48 Here, scene interacts with agent and act, linking the human world and the landscape together in meaningful ways, and marking Fire Island with the form-making energies of its human actors. By engaging both scene and agent as key elements of meaning, the image projects a harmonious balance of human and natural worlds, a balance offered by Fire Island as a refuge from a world increasingly out of kilter, and ever more so with the outbreak of war in Europe. In one beach photograph, Glenway Wescott holds up a large piece of driftwood, forming a triangle with his body while Paul Cadmus anchors its end; the distant black and white lighthouse inverts the colors on Wescott’s bathing trunks and white T-shirt.49 Legs spread and arms straining above him, his body echoes the form of this lighthouse, which perforates the distant horizon. The elements in this photograph suggest an alphabet formed by bodies and props: the triangulated shapes of Wescott’s body—completing the larger form of the driftwood he holds up—are echoed by the triangular spurs of beach formed by the tracks of a dune buggy on the sand, and by the horizon line that meets these in the distance. Here again, as in the previous photograph, a form-making gesture by one of the two actors in the scene asserts the role of the human agent in a scene of nature.

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Figure 38.  Paul Cadmus, Margaret French, and Bernard Perlin, Fire Island. c. 1938. Vintage silver print. 5 × 6 ⅞ in. Photograph by Jared French. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York.

Serving this human motivational structure is the act of staging that assumes control over the randomness of the scene: choosing that scene with deliberation, using its found objects as props, and exploiting its shifting atmospherics in ways that once again assert the meaning-making power of art. Staging involved the conscious enactment of everyday dramas in ways that returned a sense of structure and control to a situation in which the actors lacked such control in real life. The photographs they made together represented a form of symbolic action that returned agency to them, an agency absent in their lived experience, shaped as it was by an unsteady relay of emotion and circumstance. In other photographs, however, the scenic elements of the staging seem to overwhelm the human drama and its act of inscribing meaning onto the

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world. Discussed above, “Margaret and Paul, Fire Island” shows the two figures dominated in scale by a precarious wooden framing structure draped in heavy fabric on the left half of the image. The frail wooden supports seem unfitted to bear the sculptural weight of the fabric as it falls in spiraling folds toward the ground. This odd structure expresses both weight and the torquing energies of the fabric, in contrast with the planar surfaces of the structure (a house?) against which the two principals are framed. Here, relative scale and scenic elements dominate over the narrative of emotional confrontation that unfolds between the two figures. This striking image dramatizes the conflict within the lives of the two actors in terms of elements over which they have little control, each element within the scene suggesting a disruptive domesticity entangling them (see figure 1). Of Burke’s pentad, it is scene that plays a primary role here, shadowing the actions and desires played out in their lives, and framing the outcome of the conflicts that engulf them. In other photographs, Paul and Margaret pose in an abandoned house with broken and boarded-up windows, looking toward the camera, held by Jared, who shoots down at them at an angle. Damaged houses appear as fraught symbols of the precarious familial bond that brought the three together in the first place, beset by both natural forces and the group’s own unstable alliances. Such scenic elements overshadow the agency of human actors by asserting the limiting conditions within which they enact their daily lives.

+  +  +  + The formal grammar of many PaJaMa photographs turns upon triangles and triangulations—in both two and three dimensions.50 Triangles appear in many different permutations: in built structures such as stairs; in found objects and structures around which actions are performed or bodies posed; in triangular props; and in triadic compositions of three people, or two people and an implied third. Triangles and triads bring to light one of the “rules of the game” that directed their staging and that challenged their creativity

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while bringing with it a host of allusions.51 Across the decade or more of PaJaMa’s production, triangular forms functioned as a device that those within the network came to anticipate and look for in the photographs, forming part of their playful self-referentiality. They may even have acted like parlor games in which players search for and decode the shapes within, while being offered voyeuristic glimpses into private dramas. The drafting triangle Paul Cadmus playfully holds in a photograph of 1940 uses the gratuitous prop both as a winking inside reference and, perhaps, a signature of the three-part collaboration of PaJaMa itself. For a group of artists and writers for whom works and lives were so intertwined, the forms through which they chose to represent themselves carried both philosophical and personal weight. As a recurrent motif, triangulated compositions went hand in hand with personal triadic arrangements in a manner that queered the two-part heterosexual coupling of mainstream US culture. In place of the locked and ostensibly stable pairing of one and one was the triad, whose internal elements were forever recombining the building blocks of everyday life in new patterns both constraining and liberating. Trailing allusions to classical mythology, ancient Pythagorean philosophy, and numerology, the number three and its forms gave a structure to the randomness of everyday life, and contributed to what Lincoln Kirstein called in another context “the rehabilitation of the commonplace, the elevation of contemporary behavior into myth.”52 In “Margaret French, George Tooker, and Jared French, Nantucket,” the three actors each form one leg of a triangulated relationship: Margaret, with Jared and Paul; George, with Paul and Jared; and Jared, with Margaret and Paul. Isolated from one another in their own space, the three are connected through the triangular structures on which they arrange their figures and which shape their lives. In one of the stagier photographs by PaJaMa, Paul lies asleep on a dune, the horizon of the coastline rising above him, while Margaret—fully

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Figure 39.  Margaret French, George Tooker, and Jared French, Nantucket. c. 1946. Vintage silver print. 5 × 6 ⅞ in. Photograph by Paul Cadmus. Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York.

clothed—crouches nearby, her face cast into shadow by the parasol she holds, as she gazes at Paul’s recumbent form. Echoing mythic narratives of voyeurism and desire, the image ponders the complications of sexual and romantic longing so central to this triad.53 Recalling older narratives of the lustful male spying on a passive female figure, it is now the female who longs for the beautiful male body. Paul is objectified, rendered passive and available to the desiring gaze of both Margaret and Jared. Photographed by Jared, the image enacts the spectacle of his desire for Paul through the eyes of his wife, Margaret, who also doubles as a censoring presence. Margaret’s crouching figure suggests both jealousy and potential violence—a predatory quality conjured by Paul’s artfully torn T-shirt, which recalls death as much as sleep. Margaret’s desire for her husband may in turn have been inflamed

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Figure 40.  Paul Cadmus and Margaret French, Fire Island. c. 1939. Vintage silver print. 4 ⅜ × 6 7/16 in. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Gift of Lincoln Kirstein, 1985. Image source: Art Resource, NY.

by the spectacle of Jared’s displaced longing for Paul. Adding another complication, Kirstein owned the photograph; its narrative of voyeurism may have channeled his own apparently unrequited desire for Paul.54 Here, as elsewhere in PaJaMa’s works, the conflicted longings of everyday life are knowingly sublimated into the realm of myth and legend. Kirstein’s curated collection of PaJaMa images included several that were organized around motifs of triangulation and voyeurism. As friend, collector, and mentor of those within the network, he was also a voyeuristic observer of the scenarios of sexual tension, jealousy, and desire enacted in the photographs. In figure 26, for instance, Margaret, Paul, and Fidelma form a triad of figures carefully composed into a tense if shallow triangle, with Margaret at its high point while Fidelma, looking sulky, forms one end and

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her brother Paul the other end of its base. Margaret gazes steadfastly at Paul, who lowers his eyes. The triangle of figures is echoed by a triangular shape formed by the vertical and lateral elements of a fence; Margaret’s head and torso are pinioned inside the sharp angle formed by the fence posts, its plunging point trapping her in a visual vise. The image carried multiple embedded references to the personal lives of the group. Fidelma—Kirstein’s wife and Paul’s sister—found herself in triangulated relationships with Kirstein’s serial lovers, a situation made more fraught by his long-term private flirtation with Paul. And as we know, Margaret in turn shared her husband with Paul, and Paul was shared by Jared and George Tooker in these years. Posed in an uneasy tension with one another, all three figures were bound within an interpersonal framework that conditioned their own autonomy. Locking figures into a taut compositional structure, the formal organization of these photographs held in place the psychic and emotional energies constantly threatening their ménage. Alongside this tense containment, however, are narrative elements that point toward disruption and repetition. The number three, Kirstein wrote, contained both “plurality and multiplicity.” Unlike two, three “has a beginning, middle, and end,” setting into motion drama and development—in short, the trajectory of a story.55 The essential element of plot that played a key role in PaJaMa’s photographs was thus explicitly linked to their triadic structure. As forms, triangles are geometrically anchored and internally balanced.56 But as human, social configurations, triangulated or triadic relationships—in contrast to the conventionally dyadic structure of heteronormative marriage or partnership, which, in theory at least, was locked within symmetrical needs—involved an inherent instability. The shifting triadic personal relationships among the three principals of PaJaMa, along with other members of the group, generated the sense of taut emotional precarity we have observed in many of these photographs.57

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The trio of PaJaMa found its mirror in a second ménage à trois connecting them with George Platt Lynes. Stone Blossom: A Conversation Piece (1940) is Cadmus’s triple portrait of Lynes with Glenway Westcott and Wescott’s lifetime partner, Monroe Wheeler. The three lived together in a New York apartment and shared a weekend home in New Jersey owned by Wescott’s family. Cadmus pointedly organized the triple portrait around a triangular composition. The three men are locked into a stable pyramidal arrangement, recalling the triangulated configuration of figures within a classical pediment. Wescott occupies the role of Zeus at the apex of the composition, commanding physical and proprietary dominance over the two paired figures at the base of the triangle, who project a studied lack of interest. Those inside the circle, however, knew that it was Wheeler and Lynes—involved in a longterm love affair in which Wescott was the third wheel—who held the real power in controlling the emotional and sexual energies that coursed through the triad. Wescott remained a reluctant observer, only occasionally receiving the sexual favors of Lynes. A series of inside jokes affirmed the audience for the work as those familiar with the intimate dynamics of this threesome. Lynes apparently liked this image of himself as the object of desire, for he would eventually own Conversation Piece; whether through gift or purchase from Cadmus, the painting assumed a place of honor over his bed in his second New York apartment, where it played its part in the semistaged photographs Lynes did of studio models and lovers posing nude—and in one instance, in full masturbatory foreplay—on his bed. The act of photographic capture prepared the way for sex. In its restaging, Lynes shifted Cadmus’s subtext in Conversation Piece from his role as desired object to that of sexual agent. By incorporating the painting into his own world, the photographer enacted with his lovers another version of the power dynamics within the painting (see figure 7).58 Literary theorist René Girard argued that desire is driven by envy for what others have, and by a sense of rivalry with another for the loved one.59

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Girard’s term for the desire to possess what was held by another was acquisitive mimesis. In this world of deflected emotions and longings, the subject ends up imitating the desires of others (thus mimetic), producing a familiar structure of triangulation that is central to Girard’s understanding of its dynamics.60 Fundamental to Girard’s insights about the operations of desire is that it is always mediated by an external agent rather than being internally generated. “The subject needs a rival in order to feel love or sexual desire.”61 We know desire because we see it through another’s eyes, the eyes of one who has that which one wants; it is always deflected and indirect: an emotion known only through its mirror. “As he places his feet on the ladder, the lover’s ultimate thoughts go to the husbands, fathers, and fiancés, that is, the rivals—never to the woman who is waiting for him on the balcony . . . In the birth of desire, the third person is always present.”62 In this scenario, the desiring subject is drawn to the mediator and rival in a conflicted form of love and hate—admiration and envy for a person who both presents an obstacle to the desired object and externalizes and enacts that desire. Desire is driven by the spectacle of desire in another. Envy toward the rival is the shadow projection of love, indeed emerging as a more powerful force than love itself.63 When two people desire the same object—be it a love object (internal mimesis) or an ambition or a set of attributes (external mimesis)—they become rivals for the possession of that object, a condition that can produce violent impulses. Given its origins in envy, the mimetic urge driving attachments to things and people in the world was linked to “quarrels, jealous rages mortal combats . . . a permanent source of disorder even within the most harmonious of communities.”64 These impulses—Girard hypothesized—were at the origin of all communal formation; the resulting chaos was managed through a social contract that would ensure collective order, in which the disorganized violence of mimetic desires would be redirected toward one appointed figure—the scapegoat. Girard’s theorization of the link between desire and violence strikingly resonates with the

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triadic dynamics staged by PaJaMa, with their undercurrents of stylized violence.65 Girard’s theories about mimetic desire also build toward a new understanding of how subjectivity itself is formed, significantly revising an older topos of the autonomous self, in which engagement with the object world reflected internal emotions. Within a Romantic episteme whose origins were in the late eighteenth century, this internal world—shaped by experience— became the measure of emotional authenticity and wholeness. “The romantic vaniteux always wants to convince himself that his desire is written into the nature of things, or . . . that it is the emanation of a serene subjectivity, the creation ex nihilo of a quasi divine ego.”66 Girard recast older notions of selfhood—revealing its constitutive dependence on other selves—in ways that broaden our understanding of the intersubjective turn in PaJaMa’s work.

c onc lusion Denied the stability and security claimed—if not often realized—by the heteroreproductive nuclear family, PaJaMa used photography to explore an alternative family of sorts, circulated among a select audience of intimates. Their photographic play helped bind together this self-cloistered group at a time of great historical urgency. These were years of peculiar intensity for the circle—when private lives were shared among others who were living through similar challenges and who, as a network without children, may also have been concerned with leaving a record of their passage through time. World War II threw into high relief their private worlds as a place apart. In their afternoons on the beach, PaJaMa had transmuted the everyday disorder of real lives into images that endowed the fraught present with weight and playfully ritualized enactment. But the postwar years saw a slow dispersion of the focused intimacy that drove their production, as they traveled to Europe and as Paul, Margaret, and Jared rearranged their private lives into new configurations.

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The power of images to shape the fleeting, impermanent quality of everyday life through a structuring sense of plot underlies PaJaMa’s serious play. In these years, the proliferating image worlds of photography, film, and advertising presented challenges to a queer social network necessarily inward turning. How to remain engaged with the culture of the present, while bending it to their own distilled ends? How—to use a metaphor invoked in 1951 by media theorist Marshall McLuhan—to remain buoyant, maintaining one’s orientation as one is swept down into the maelstrom of mass media?67 Their staged photographs challenged friends and associates to decipher meaning and identify patterns of recognition within the images. Instead of reproducing the world—acting as an instrument through which to discover new eyes on the world as known—photography for PaJaMa became a form of symbolic action. They turned photography against itself; in their hands, it became an agent of renewal capable of “rehabilitating the commonplace,” transforming real life into drama, humor, and the stuff of everyday myth. Staged PaJaMa photographs courted elegance and grace while knowingly teetering on the brink of melodrama. Their performativity offered a cover through which to enact the very serious business of living unconventionally. Their aesthetic—and that of their associate George Platt Lynes in these years—would eventually be taken up by advanced fashion and advertising, in which performativity and artifice took center stage, no longer play but industry standard, lacking, however, their critical edge. More significantly, PaJaMa’s use of staging anticipated the postmodern turn toward artists who used photography as an instrument of self-performance and role-playing. Their open-ended narratives, receptive to projection and imagination, share in the ambiguity and lack of resolution that Douglas Crimp identified in 1979 as fundamental to the “Pictures Generation.”68 Both PaJaMa and Cindy Sherman referenced film and the constructed nature of identity. But for Sherman, the self was immersed and dyed in the colors of mass media, whereas for PaJaMa, selves were formed intersubjectively

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through social networks and shaped by the interpersonal dramas that were the stuff of life, and art. Several decades removed from the 1970s, PaJaMa faced a cultural landscape proportionately less inundated with mass culture than this later group of artists. Transforming intimate moments of selfexposure into stilled tableaux in a manner that straddles the late nineteenth and the late twentieth centuries, PaJaMa’s understated appropriations from other media subtly undermined modernist claims to authenticity and originality. Their belief in playacting to relax personal and social relations—rendering them more pragmatically fluid—was very much of its own historical moment: a muted resistance to the determinisms threatening to throttle the theater of the everyday.

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n o t e s a n d A c k n ow l e d g m e n t s

i n t roduc t ion 1.  For a larger historical survey of these and other photographs, see Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell, Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Love, 1850s–1950s (Milan: 5 Continents, 2020). 2.  George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1995). 3.  The arguments here are much indebted to Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 24, no. 2 (Winter 1998): 547–66. For a different emphasis—and one we attend to as well—see Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993), 137, on the “queer resignification of the family [as] the most vital element of re-imagined kinship . . . the social and discursive building of community.” 4.  The Smithsonian American Art Museum, in particular, has made its collection readily available online: https://americanart.si.edu/artist/margaretfrench-26654, accessed March 11, 2021. 5.  Glenway Wescott, A Heaven of Words: Last Journals, 1956–1984 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), 13. 6.  On the role of gossip “as a form of social activity which produces and maintains the filiations of artistic community,” see Gavin Butt, Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World, 1948–19 63 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

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t h e us e s of pho t o gr a ph s / n ic k m au s s Acknowledgments: My heartfelt thanks to Angela Miller for the adventure of this ongoing dialogue into friendship. Our countless conversations have left their traces throughout my essay, which is entirely shaped by Angela’s sensitive readings and revelatory questions. Thanks also to Roxana Marcoci, Samantha Friedman, and Stuart Comer of the Museum of Modern Art; David Horowitz of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Shawn Wilson of the Kinsey Institute; Paul Civitelli and Mary Ellen Budney of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University; Matthew Krejcarek of the Irving Penn Foundation; Alexandra Whitney of David Zwirner Gallery; Linda Briscoe Myers at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin; the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library; the Princeton University Art Museum; the Art Institute of Chicago; Keith de Lellis; and the Estate of George Platt Lynes for providing crucial access to images and archives. Finally, for their encouragement and brutal honesty, I’d like to thank Baptiste Pinteaux, Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen, Aleksandr Rossman, Leonie Radine, Russel Janzen, and Ken Okiishi. 1.  In his landmark study Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), George Chauncey details some of the restrictions on public representations of homosexuality and theorizes how such limits on visibility were circumvented by gay men: “But being forced to hide from the dominant culture did not keep them hidden from each other. Gay men developed a highly sophisticated system of subcultural codes—codes of dress, speech, and style—that enabled them to recognize one another on the streets, at work, and at parties and bars, and to carry on intricate conversations whose coded meaning was unintelligible to potentially hostile people around them. The very need for such codes, it is usually (and rightly) argued, is evidence of the degree to which gay men had to hide. But the elaboration of such codes also indicates the extraordinary resilience of the men who lived under such constraints and their success in communicating with each other despite them” (4). Richard Meyer’s Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art (Brattleboro, VT: Echo Point Books & Media, 2002) analyzes artistic expressions of homosexual subject positions in defiance of the US ideological state apparatus.

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2.  Donald Windham, “Which Urges and Reasonably So the Attraction of Some for Others,” Yale Review, no. 4 (October 1998): 28. 3.  George Balanchine, “George Platt Lynes,” in New York City Ballet: Photographs from 1935 through 1955 taken by George Platt Lynes 1907–1956 (New York: City Center of Music and Drama, 1957), n.p. 4.  The publisher and curator Monroe Wheeler was an important fixture at the Museum of Modern Art during its first decades, first as curator, then as director of publications, and ultimately as director of exhibitions. His lifelong partner, Glenway Wescott, published poems, novels, and short stories to great acclaim. Lynes joined Wheeler’s and Wescott’s partnership in 1928, forming an imbalanced romantic triad that lasted fifteen years and included a nearly decade-long domestic living arrangement at 48 East Eighty-Ninth Street, which Lynes broke off in 1943. See Miller, “PaJaMa Drama,” for more on their ménage. Though Wheeler’s and Lynes’s was the primary sexual relationship in the triad, both Wheeler and Wescott were devoted to promoting Lynes’s career, and ultimately, his legacy. The polymath Lincoln Kirstein, arguably one of the most influential cultural impresarios of American modernism, was responsible for bringing ballet to the United States, and championed figurative painting and sculpture as well as modern photography. 5.  The blanket exclusion of fashion photography from serious art historical scrutiny helps to reinforce a purist, hieratic view of modernist art as impervious to other forms of modern visual culture. While this essay draws attention to the interplay between fashion and avant-garde photography, I do not address the equally crucial development and influence on Lynes of another contemporaneous photographic genre deemed “secondary,” though it touches just as much as fashion photography on the entwined nerve endings of art history and the commercialization of the desired body: “physique” or “beefcake” photography, as innovated in New York by Edwin Townsend. Lynes purchased Townsend’s classicizing photographic nudes of the “first physique icon,” Tony Sansone, directly from the model, and he would go on to photograph Tony himself (and to photograph his son Nino Sansone three decades later), as well as other “physique” models such as the Ritter brothers. Thomas Waugh presents a detailed history of the development of the gay male erotic image in his study Hard to Imagine: Gay Male Eroticism in Photography and Film from Their Beginnings to Stonewall (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

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6.  Katherine Ware, “Between Dadaism and Moma-ism at the Julien Levy Gallery,” in Dreaming in Black and White: Photography at the Julien Levy Gallery (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2006), 15. 7.  Anatole Pohorilenko, When We Were Three: The Travel Albums of George Platt Lynes, Monroe Wheeler, and Glenway Wescott (Ann Arbor, MI: Arena Editions, 1998), 75. 8.  A portrait by Lynes of Christopher Isherwood shows the author gazing fixedly at an issue of Photographie, presumably scrutinizing a reproduction of one of Lynes’s photographs—thus it is both a portrait of an author revered by Lynes and an image of that admiration reciprocated. This staging of mutual interest and inspiration among (queer) artists is a consistent feature of Lynes’s work, and Isherwood would remain a recurring subject of Lynes’s over the span of decades—  certainly the photographer identified with the opening lines of Isherwood’s  1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin: “I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking . . . Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.” Isherwood, The Berlin Stories (New York: New Directions, 2008), 207. 9.  Lynes, quoted in Steven Haas, “Intimate Exposures,” in George Platt Lynes: The Male Nudes, ed. Steven Haas (New York: Rizzoli, 2011), n.p. 10.  The history of the production and circulation of photographs of naked men—whether academic, athletic, or erotic—is too vast to address here, and complicated by the interplay of artistic, pornographic, commercial, and amateur imaging imperatives that span the history of the photographic medium itself. Waugh’s Hard to Imagine is an invaluable study of the complex and irrepressible dispersion of photochemically produced images of gay desire through and across various social and aesthetic regimes and markets. To grasp the conditions under which Lynes’s male nudes were received, it is important to see how their discreet visibility was multidetermined by various social and personal factors: the transmission of sexual representations of any kind via literature, cinema, radio, print media, or the post was censored as obscene in the early twentieth-century United States. The various legal codes put in place to regulate obscenity, however, were vague and erratic at best and often easily circumvented. With regard to homoerotic images, not only were homophile media in general and the picturing of homoerotic sex acts and male genital exposure forbidden, but the mere

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representation of a homosexual as a visible social type was also extremely controversial. Owning or circulating “obscene” material and engaging in nonreproductive sex acts were criminal offenses whose punishment by law was most certainly followed by a civil punishment of social and professional ostracization, loss of livelihood and family. The congregation of homosexuals for social or sexual purposes was often forbidden or subject to police raids, especially in New York. Homosexuals were not permitted to serve in the armed forces (though of course tens of thousands did). This litany of prohibitions is only the public face of countless other internalized or unspoken restrictions that mapped the psychological and geographical terrain of homosexual life in early twentieth-century New York, which Lynes (and by extension, countless other men) sidestepped, subverted, and transformed into art. Lynes’s life as an artist coincides with the seemingly paradoxical increase in homosexual visibility (reaching its peak in the 1940s with the publication, in 1941, of Dr. George Henry’s Sex Variants and, in 1948, of Alfred Kinsey’s bestseller Sexual Behavior in the Human Male) and the fortification of the closet as a compulsory holding cell, socially engineered to prevent homosexual self-expression and agency. 11.  George Platt Lynes to Alfred Kinsey, April 2, 1953, Kinsey Institute Library & Special Collections, Indiana University, Bloomington. 12.  David Leddick, George Platt Lynes (Cologne: Taschen, 2000), 108. 13.  George Platt Lynes to Alfred Kinsey, March 17, 1954, Kinsey Institute Library & Special Collections. Lynes and Kinsey were introduced in 1950 and struck up an animated correspondence, driven by Kinsey’s interest in Lynes’s entire body of work, and by his desire to interview artists as part of his research into male homosexuality. In April 1953 Lynes wrote to Kinsey, seeking his advice: “ . . . I want to make a new will . . . and of course the question of what to do about my negatives comes up. The important portrait negatives probably will go to some or other university; I’ll ask somebody else’s advice about that. But what of the nudes? Who would want, and take care of, them? I don’t want them burried [sic] in some archive. I do want prints to be available to anybody who may want them. They are not, as you know, ‘pornographic’; and as many as not (or am I wrong about this?) are pure and plain enough to satisfy even the postal authorities.” 14.  While a few of Lynes’s nudes were bought and sold during his lifetime (and Lynes himself participated in the market for nude photographs, purchasing

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or trading a variety of historical and contemporary nudes for his own collection), judging by most accounts these images were given away as gifts. Astute though he was about the commercial and artistic market for photographs, Lynes understood that the majority of his nudes operated outside such systems. In the aftermath of Lynes’s death, however, Glenway Wescott notes in his diaries that Lynes’s brother Russell was searching for nude photographs to sell, suggesting that by 1955 there was something of an underground market for them. A 1978 postcard from Paul Cadmus to George Tooker reports that “George’s pictures sell for (if they sell) 600 a piece nowadays so I hope to make a little money.” Paul Cadmus to George Tooker, George Tooker Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 15.  Richard Meyer, “Lookout: On Queer American Art and History,” in A Companion to American Art, ed. John Davis, Jennifer A. Greenhill, and Jason D. LaFountain (West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 436. 16.  Meyer, Outlaw Representation, 15. 17.  It seems that Glenway Wescott, too, suffered creatively under the unspoken restrictions he faced as a homosexual author. In 1957 he copied out a quote from Gogol in his diary: “My pen keeps writing things the censorship will never pass . . . All that remains for me to do is to think of a subject so innocent that it will not hurt the feelings of even a policeman. My mind seems paralyzed.” Wescott, A Heaven of Words: Last Journals, 1956–1984 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2013), 32. 18.  “Illustrations of Mythology: Photographs by George Platt Lynes, Text by Glenway Wescott,” in U.S. Camera, January/February 1939. To his great disappointment, not even one of Lynes’s many book projects came to fruition. Neither his book of “myths,” nor the aborted series of nude male models configured into letters of the alphabet, nor the book of ballet photographs planned by painter Marsden Hartley (to whom Lynes gave over part of his studio in 1943) was published, and Lynes himself canceled the volume of nudes he had planned to publish with the Swiss homophile imprint Der Kreis under the title American Beauty. “What do you think of my doing a book to be called The Young and Beautiful,” Lynes wrote to Wescott in 1947, “which could include anybody and everybody more or less—except the artists of whom I still want to make a separate volume one of these days? I’ve started a new scrapbook, portraits, nudes, anything, to

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see how it shapes up.” George Platt Lynes to Monroe Wheeler, September 9, 1947, box 69, folder 999, YCAL MSS 134, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (hereafter Beinecke Library), Yale University. 19.  See, for example, Der Kreis, July 1950, 12, Lynes’s first appearance in the magazine, where the images were dangerously attributed to his real name, while subsequent reproductions ran under pseudonyms. 20.  Robert W. Marks, “Portrait of George Lynes,” Coronet, July 1939, 170. The myths mentioned in this lineup of “types” refer to Lynes’s over-the-top series of photographic illustrations of ancient Greek myths, initiated in 1938 at the suggestion of Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Wescott. 21.  While scrapbooks were generally made by a single person, their making should not be understood as a solipsistic activity but as a dialogic one. Books were shared with close friends and often incorporated materials contributed by the maker’s intimates. It was not uncommon for artists to enclose “scraps” with their letters to one another as a way to signal their familiarity with the addressee’s interests and predilections, as if to say, “I know you, because I know what you like.” The writer Katherine Anne Porter, for example, sent a clipping of an early photograph of the poet Rimbaud (aged eleven, in his communion outfit) to Lynes for inclusion in his scrapbook of 1939. 22.  The absorption of the popular practice of scrapbooking by the avant-garde can be dated as early as World War I; Brigid Doherty pinpoints the popular practice of making scrapbooks en masse (to be sent to soldiers on the Western Front) as the inspiration for the first photomontages—“discovered” (rather than invented) by the Berlin Dadaists. Brigid Doherty, “Berlin Dada: Montage and the Embodiment of Modernity, 1916–1920” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1996). 23.  Stettheimer’s example is particularly extreme. Since Stettheimer conceived of the work of art as interdependent with its subjects and audiences, it is not surprising that she willed the paintings in her studio to be destroyed upon her death, after which they would no longer be animated by the painter’s living connection to the people she had painted them for and the social events that their completion occasioned. 24.  See A. F. Pape’s 1937 photograph Cecil Beaton’s Scrapbook launch party in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery, London.

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25.  Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” Social Text, no. 25/26 (1990): 61; Bronwen Wilson, “Social Networking: The ‘Album Amicorum’ and Early Modern Public Making,” in Beyond the Public Sphere: Opinions, Publics, Spaces in Early Modern Europe, ed. Massimo Rospocher (Bologna: Il Mulino; Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2012), 206–7. 26.  Waugh, Hard to Imagine, 28. 27.  Waugh, 22. 28.  Robert W. Marks, “Portrait of George Lynes,” Coronet, July 1939, 169. 29.  George Platt Lynes, “The Camera Knows If a Woman Is in Love,” Bachelor, April 1937, 18. 30.  Early on, Lynes’s work was structured by his habits as a developing collector, and as early as 1931 he advanced from postcards, pictures of celebrities and “figure models,” or magazine clippings to art, reporting with great excitement to Wheeler, “I am now a collector. Julien [Levy] has given me twelve [Eugene] Atget’s in exchange for some of my pictures; they are very charming, and some of them really excellent. And I am, of course, being collected.” Levy’s use of Atget photographs as payment is one example of photography’s circulation as “currency” in the early twentieth century, and the exchange evidently gave Lynes a sense of artistic confirmation, granting him both the agency of the collector and proof of his worth in “being collected.” George Platt Lynes to Monroe Wheeler, March 16, 1931, box 68, folder 985, YCAL MSS 134, Beinecke Library, Yale University. 31.  George Platt Lynes to Monroe Wheeler, May 7, 1930, box 68, folder 985, YCAL MSS 134, Beinecke Library, Yale University. 32.  Haas, “Intimate Exposures,” n.p. 33.  John Ayto, Movers and Shakers: A Chronology of Words That Shaped Our Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 72. 34.  The function of these gift images is not unlike love letters, or the circulation of painted portrait miniatures among friends, lovers, and family members in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England and the United States, or the exchange of painted fans inscribed with verse between nineteenth-century painters, poets, and their muses. 35.  Samuel Steward, “George Platt Lynes,” Advocate, December 10, 1981, 22.

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36.  Nicknames, abbreviations, pseudonyms, noms de plume, and alter egos were commonly used to establish and intensify kinship among artists and writers of the period. Cadmus and the Frenches went by “PaJaMa,” “Man Ray” was the chosen name of Emmanuel Radnitzky, Duchamp’s female alter ego “Rrose Sélavy” authored several of his works, Lynes was referred to as “Giorgio” by friends and family, and Tennessee Williams called Tchelitchew “Chilly Death.” João de Pina-Cabral has written about the function of nicknames: “Their perishability and the lack of a strict system of application are central features of nicknames, for they allow for changes in the judgement of the bearer’s reputation by the community.” Man (New Series) 19, no. 1 (March 1984): 148–50. 37.  Christopher Isherwood, Christopher Isherwood Diaries, vol. 1, 1939– 60 (New York: Vintage, 1990), 209 (February 4, 1942). 38.  Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: Routledge, 2002), 4. 39.  George Platt Lynes, “Portraits Should Be Imaginative . . . , ” Minicam Photography, February 1943, 50. Gertrude Stein’s 1946 introduction to her Selected Writings begins: “I always wanted to be historical, from almost a baby on. . . . ” Stein, “A Message from Gertrude Stein,” in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), vii. Max Ewing wrote to Lynes with some encouraging advice: “These pictures of Gertrude Stein are superb. Why don’t you become a professional amateur photographer? I am sure you would find it profitable.” Max Ewing to George Platt Lynes, box 70, folder 1008, YCAL MSS 134, Beinecke Library, Yale University. 40.  Katherine Anne Porter to George Platt Lynes, April 14, 1933, series 2, box 1, folder 3, Glenway Wescott Collection, University of Maryland Library, Maryland. 41.  Max Ewing to George Platt Lynes, ca. 1933, box 7, folder 54, Max Ewing Collection, YCAL MSS 656, Beinecke Library, Yale University. 42.  Lynes, “Portraits Should Be Imaginative. . . . ,” 50. 43.  Windham, “Which Urges and Reasonably So,” 28. 44.  In George Chauncey’s words: “The gay world that flourished before World War II has been almost entirely forgotten in popular memory and overlooked by professional historians; it is not supposed to have existed . . . Gay 

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people in the prewar years . . . did not speak of coming out of what we call the ‘gay closet’ but rather of coming out into what they called ‘homosexual society’ or the ‘gay world,’ a world neither so small, nor so isolated, nor, often, so hidden as ‘closet’ implies.” Chauncey, Gay New York, 22–23. 45.  Bonwit Teller began hiring artists to design its windows as early as the 1930s and presented innovative displays in coordination with exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, such as Salvador Dalí’s windows, parallel to his inclusion in the 1936 exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism (in which Lynes’s photomontage Sleepwalker was shown under the category “Artists Independent of the Dada and Surrealist Movements”). Window dressing, fashion photography, hatmaking, and fashion design, along with work in theater and ballet décor, would remain the tacit professional domain of queer men for decades. In the 1950s and ’60s, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol all worked in window display, and Warhol’s understanding that “all the artists who worked in windows went into a gallery” was borne out by his first presentation of paintings in a Bonwit Teller window display in 1960 and his subsequent exhibition at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery in 1962. 46.  Alfred Barr, “A Modern Art Questionnaire,” Vanity Fair, August 1927, 85. 47.  Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus: A Biography (Scranton: W. W. Norton, 2006), 70. 48.  Willard D. Morgan, “The View Finder,” Complete Photographer, no. 26 (1942): 1694. 49.  George Platt Lynes to Monroe Wheeler, January 18, 1948, YCAL MSS 134, Beinecke Library, Yale University. 50.  One of Lynes’s most frequently reproduced “artistic” images from 1935 was titled Sleepwalker, and other titles aspire to a similarly enigmatic and philosophical charge, such as Man in His Element, The Tensed Hand, and The Image Out of Schopenhauer. 51.  The recursive gesture of the upraised hand punctuates Lynes’s portraits, self-portraits, nudes, and fashion images, though it takes on different valences in each iteration. The same powerfully ambiguous gesture is a constant in Balanchine’s choreography, most notably in the opening of his 1934 ballet Serenade (made for pupils of the then brand-new School of American Ballet), which Lynes is likely to have seen in subsequent years. I am grateful to Alastair Macaulay for

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sharing his detailed knowledge of Balanchine’s vocabulary, and pinpointing the first instances of the gesture of the upraised hand in his dances. I suggest that Lynes absorbed this gesture as a spectator, and perhaps also during his work with Balanchine and his dancers, and used it to communicate distance, blindness, reticence, and protection from exposure. 52.  My thanks again to Alastair Macaulay for helping confirm Nicholas Magallanes as one of the models in this photograph. 53.  Guy Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 97. Lynes’s untitled photograph bears an uncanny resemblance to Man Ray’s 1930 photograph of a nude model (generally believed to be Lee Miller) in a peculiar pose, inspired by de Sade, and titled La priere (The prayer): kneeling, as if in a gesture of supplication, and bent forward to expose her buttocks, the model loops her arms backwards and clasps her hands protectively over her anus. It is entirely possible that Lynes would have seen this image, either directly through Man Ray or Julien Levy, or in a printed portfolio from the time. The similarity between these images (formally, but also in their direct allusion to nonreproductive sexual acts) brings up the double standard by which male artists objectifying the female body, even with intention to scandalize, continue to be shown leniency and are celebrated for their audacity, while the exposure of the male body is vehemently denied and declared obscene, or kitsch. 54.  Quoted in David Leddick, Intimate Companions: A Triography of George Platt Lynes, Paul Cadmus, Lincoln Kirstein, and Their Circle (London: St. Martin’s Press, 2001), 149. 55.  Robin Muir relates that Coffin lived in terror of these images “falling into the wrong hands” but also that he considered them his finest work. Muir, “The Varnished Truth,” in Clifford Coffin: Photographs from Vogue 1945 to 1955 (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 1997), 17. Horst P. Horst also made male nude studies, and it is unclear when he began publicly exhibiting or reproducing them. 56.  According to Chauncey, “the term ‘trade’ sometimes referred specifically to ‘straight’ male prostitutes, but it also continued to be used to refer to ‘straight’ men who had sex with queers or fairies for pleasure rather than money . . . So long as the men abide by the conventions of masculinity, they ran little risk of undermining their status as ‘normal’ men.” Chauncey, Gay New York, 70.

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57.  Major monographs have disregarded Lynes’s “in-between” categories, siloing those difficult-to-categorize works into one of the following: portraits, ballet, fashion, mythology, and nudes. 58.  Lynes, “Portraits Should Be Imaginative . . . ,” 50. 59.  Lynes, “Camera Knows If a Woman Is in Love,” 18. 60.  Lynes, 18. 61.  Lynes, 32. 62.  Lynes, 32. 63.  Lynes, 18. 64.  Windham, “Which Urges and Reasonably So,” 27. 65.  George Platt Lynes studio mail-out, box 69, folder 1000, YCAL MSS 134, Beinecke Library, Yale University. 66.  Phillip Andrews, “Fashion Photography,” Complete Photographer, no. 26 (1941): 1688. 67.  Quoted in Leddick, Intimate Companions, 149. 68.  As an example of how eroticized images traveled from artist to artist, Tchelitchew’s 1931 painting of Levinson’s “rose necklace” would go on to inspire the title of Tennessee Williams’s 1950 play The Rose Tattoo, as well as the tattoo of a rose garland worn by Samuel Steward, a protégé of Gertrude Stein who went on to befriend Lynes as well. 69.  For more on Féral Benga, a “unique figure of modern primitivism,” see James Smalls, “Féral Benga: African Muse of Modernism,” Nka, Journal of Contemporary African Art 41 (November 2017): 44-59. “Benga’s corporeality,” writes Smalls, “and its visual representation by others brought not only Africa, but also the silence of and blindness to the homoerotic into the orbit of primitivism and modern black Atlantic discourses.” 70.  George Platt Lynes, telegram to Monroe Wheeler, February 18, 1927, folder 982, YCAL MSS 134, Beinecke Library, Yale University. 71.  Lynes posed for photographic portraits by PaJaMa, Cecil Beaton, Man Ray, George Hoyningen-Huene, Roy Pinney, and his former assistant James Ogle; he was painted and drawn (and even sculpted) by Jared French, Paul Cadmus, Pavel Tchelitchew, Florine Stettheimer, and Jean Cocteau; he was “fictionalized” by Donald Windham and Samuel Steward; and he was memorialized by Edwin Denby, Christopher Isherwood, Carl Van Vechten, Lincoln Kirstein, John

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Martin, Marianne Moore, Edith Sitwell, and Osbert Sitwell in the publication produced by Dance Society in the year following Lynes’s death. 72.  George Balanchine, “George Platt Lynes,” in New York City Ballet: Photographs from 1935 through 1955 Taken by George Platt Lynes 1907–1956 (New York: City Center of Music and Drama, 1957). 73.  In addition to collaborating with choreographers on composing photographs inspired by their dances, Lynes frequently asked them to arrange dancers’ bodies in configurations unrelated to any existing choreography. These compositions were developed in spontaneous dialogue, leading to further poses of dancers arranged solely by Lynes once the choreographers had left the set. Lynes absorbed this practice into other photographic scenarios, such as a group of four male models (nondancers) photographed in various dramatic arrangements on a stagelike platform. One photograph of this grouping of models identifies them as the “GPL Quartett [sic],” underscoring the degree to which Lynes saw himself as an impresario and recognized an affinity between the workings of his own studio and a dance studio. 74.  Leddick, Intimate Companions, 112. 75.  Bernard Perlin recalls that “photostatted copies were framed in wallpaper borders and pasted onto the walls,” in his introduction to Leddick, Intimate Companions, xi. 76.  Such as Ingres’s 1808 Oedipus and the Sphinx photomontaged with the heads of conductor Leopold Stokowski and Greta Garbo (see Leddick, Intimate Companions, 97, top left), or Jean Moral’s 1939 photograph for Bazaar of a model in a raincoat being ogled by twin sailors in front of the Paris Opera (bottom right) and Cecil Beaton’s 1936 portrait of Mrs. Raimund von Hoffmansthal surrounded by Tchelitchew’s multiple portrait studies of her, both printed in negative (mounted in faux stereoscope to the left of Jean Moral’s image—these photographs identified by the author). 77.  Haas, “Intimate Exposures.” 78.  See Lucien Dällenbach’s study on the literary and artistic device of mise en abyme, The Mirror in the Text (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 79.  Haas, “Intimate Exposures.” 80.  Most famously in Cecil Beaton’s story on new American fashions for the March 1951 issue of Vogue, in which models posed before Jackson Pollock’s

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paintings in his 1950 exhibition at Betty Parsons Gallery, or Erwin Blumenfeld’s July 1945 Vogue cover in which a model is seen through the spiderweb cracks of Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23), at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. 81.  George Platt Lynes, “Portraits Should Be Imaginative. . . . ” 82.  Hal Fischer, “George Platt Lynes,” Advocate, December 10, 1981, 23. 83.  Craig Owens, “Honor, Power, and the Love of Women,” in Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power, and Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 151. 84.  Lynes, “Camera Knows If a Woman Is in Love,” 18.

paja m a dr a m a / a nge l a m i l l e r Acknowledgments: I owe a big debt to the galleries that have so generously supported this project: Bridget Moore and Ed De Luca at DC Moore Gallery; Tom Gitterman at Gitterman Gallery; Keith de Lellis at Keith de Lellis Gallery; and Brian Clamp at ClampArt. My heartiest thanks to the institutions and fellowships that offered support and access to collections during research and writing: the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery; the Metropolitan Museum Fellowship Program in History of Art and Visual Culture; and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The Terra Foundation for American Art has also provided the rich ground on which new scholarship in the field can flourish. Friends, colleagues, and scholars have contributed to the rich exchanges that have shaped my work on PaJaMa: Philip Eliasoph, Ellen Feiss, Randall Griffey, Jodi Hauptman, Scott Lowenbaum, Richard Meyer, David Peters-Corbett, Bruce Robertson, Andrew Witt, and Tatsiana Zhurauliova. Thanks also to Elizabeth Mangone and Betha Whitlow for help in preparing the manuscript. My research would not have been possible without the support of the following institutions: the staff of the Archives of American Art, which has significant holdings of PaJaMa photographs contained in the papers of the artists in the group, especially those of George Tooker and Paul Cadmus; Denise Wamaling in the Prints and Photographs Department, Smithsonian American Art Museum; and Tim Young at the Beinecke Rare Book and Research Library, who steered me through the voluminous holdings of various figures in the circle.

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I am grateful to have met Jon Anderson—the partner of Paul Cadmus—just before he died, and Jens Yow, whose reminiscences offered a living connection to the artists who made these works. Jack Woody also deserves thanks for publishing the first and only book on PaJaMa, Collaboration, as well as the anonymous collectors of PaJaMa photographs who have treasured and preserved them. Above all I would like to thank my collaborator, Nick Mauss, whose intellectual grace and generosity has transformed this project. We would both like to thank Tony Lee for his advice, guidance, and support throughout this project; our editorial and design team at University of California Press; Archna Patel, who kindly guided us through the review process at University of California Press, and our editor Naja Pulliam Collins; the anonymous readers for University of California Press; and Kelly Dennis for her suggestions. 1.  See David Leddick, Intimate Companions: A Triography of George Platt Lynes, Paul Cadmus, Lincoln Kirstein, and Their Circle (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 2, 116. The year range varies; PaJaMa did continue to make photographs as late as 1957. See preface to Collaboration: The Photographs of Paul Cadmus, Margaret French, and Jared French, ed. Jack Woody (Santa Fe: Twelvetrees Press, 1992), the only published collection of PaJaMa photographs. The bulk of their production, however, was in the years leading up to 1947. 2.  Cadmus, as quoted in Jerry Rosco, Glenway Wescott, Personally: A Biography (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 78. 3.  Cadmus apparently contrived the name; a letter he wrote on March 7, 1992, has recently surfaced in which he claimed that “both Margaret and Jared French disliked” the name. Rago Arts, auction lot 213, June 26, 2020, https:// www.ragoarts.com/auctions/2020/06/american-european-art/213. 4.  Most of these photographs were taken on Fire Island at Saltaire, about eleven miles from Cherry Grove. In those early days—1937 to 1939—Cherry Grove was already a gay world that occasionally provoked the suburban families there to outrage: Cadmus recalls one yard sign that warned, “The Lisbons must leave our young boys alone!” Theodore Bouloukos, “Survival Guide: Paul Cadmus,” Index

Magazine

(1997),

w w w.indexmagazine.com/interviews/paul_

cadmus.html. See also Esther Newton, Cherry Grove, Fire Island: Sixty Years in America’s First Gay and Lesbian Town (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 13–36.

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5.  As reported by Wescott, in Rosco, Glenway Wescott, 78. 6.  In recent years, the work has come to light as collectors or members of the network released their holdings to the market. The collection donated by Margaret French in 1999 to the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM), Department of Graphic Arts, consists of five Solander boxes of contact prints carefully cut into individual images and glued onto white sheets or black construction paper. Rich in informal snapshots and experimental work, this collection helps ground the photographs that were printed and circulated within longer sequences. See introduction, note 4, for the URL to the collection now online. The George Tooker Papers, and the papers of Tooker’s partner William Christopher, both in the Archives of American Art in Washington, DC, contain photographs that members of the group produced over time. Other collections include the George Platt Lynes Papers and the Donald Windham Papers at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (hereafter Beinecke Library), Yale University, and a group of PaJaMa photographs donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by Lincoln Kirstein in 1985. Galleries that have exhibited PaJaMa include Keith de Lellis Gallery, New York, in the fall of 2018; the Gitterman Gallery, New York, in the fall of 2015;  DC Moore Gallery, New York—long representing the Paul Cadmus estate—in  An Intimate Circle, in 2011. ClampArt in New York also has holdings of PaJaMa. I am indebted to all of these galleries for their assistance in research for this essay. 7.  Cadmus, in Bouloukos, “Survival Guide,” n.p. According to Peter Morrin, “PaJaMa Game: The Photography Collection of Paul Cadmus,” Arts Magazine 53 (December 1978): 118–19, the group developed and printed their own photographs, resulting in uneven print quality. In a letter written from Saltaire on August 22, 1944, Margaret French apologized for a series of underexposed shots: “I’m sorry about the oldness of our film . . . They look antique. So possibly there is a little charm in them [crossed out: “and that is why perhaps. . .] Whatever is a little out-of-date seems charming for that very reason—the melancholy of the immediate slightly but irremediably removed.” Box 1, “French, Margaret,” George Platt Lynes Papers, YCAL MSS 543, Beinecke Library, Yale University. According to Brian Clamp (ClampArt, interview, June 15, 2016), the PaJaMa production has not been considered “art” photographs or taken seriously because

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of the informal and private nature of the work. The group did, however, take pains to assure the life of these gelatin silver photographs, printing them on archivally sound papers. 8.  E. M. Forster’s coming to consciousness as a man who loved men was midwifed by two legendary figures in the emergence of twentieth-century queer culture: the English socialist writer Edward Carpenter and his “comrade” and lover George Merrill. Forster attributed Merrill’s knowing gesture to his lover Carpenter’s “yogified mysticism,” possibly in reference to Vedic philosophies of the body’s chakras. Forster’s account of this experience came much later, in 1960, part of an extended “Terminal Note” to his novel Maurice, written in 1913–14 but published only in 1971 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 26. The novel was enthusiastically read in manuscript by Isherwood and Cadmus. On Carpenter, see Sheila Rowbotham, Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love (London: Verso, 2008). 9.  The private circulation of these images until very recently, as well as their enigmatic and coded quality, may explain the thinness of scholarship on PaJaMa. Recent scholarship includes Richard Meyer, “Threesomes: Lincoln Kirstein’s Queer Arithmetic,” in Lincoln Kirstein’s Modern, ed. Samantha Friedman and Jodi Hauptman (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2019), 98–106; and Jarrett Earnest, ed., The Young and the Evil: Queer Modernism in New York, 1930–1955 (New York: David Zwirner Gallery, 2020). The best published compilation of PaJaMa photographs is Collaboration. Other sources that mention PaJaMa in passing are Alfonso Panzetta, Jared French by Jared French: 600 Opere Inediti dal Fondo Italiano dell’Artista (Turin: Umberto Allemandi & C., 2010); Michael Duncan, High Drama: Eugene Berman and the Legacy of the Melancholic Sublime (New York: Hudson Hills Press, in collaboration with the Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas, 2004), who commented on “the complex psychosexual dynamics of the threesome” (p. 102); David Leddick, George Platt Lynes, 1907–1955 (Cologne: Taschen, 2000); Leddick, Intimate Companions; Leddick, Naked Men: Pioneering Male Nudes (New York: Universe Publishing, 1997); Justin Spring, “PaJaMa,” a review of their work at DC Moore Gallery, Artforum 36, no. 4 (December 1997): 120; Jo-Ann Conklin, Photographs from the Collection of Carlton Willers (Iowa City: University of Iowa Museum of Art, 1993); and Peter Morrin, “PaJaMa Game: The Photography Collection of Paul Cadmus,” Arts Magazine 53 (December 1978): 118–19.

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10.  Morrin, “PaJaMa Game,” 118–19: “PAJAMA relished genius, the enjoyment of the physical senses, the unbridled power of the imagination, and clowning . . . ,” relying “on ellipsis and innuendo to suggest the ineffable . . fascinating as social documents and records of studio life, PAJAMA’s portraits . . . fall short of greatness as photographs.” Spring, “PaJaMa,” 120, called them “great fun,” despite their “apparent seriousness.” 11.  On the link many in these years drew between homosexuality and  inauthenticity, see Michael S. Sherry, Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 122–23. 12.  Authorship of these works remains mostly inferential; photographs of Margaret and Paul, which make up a very important subset, were made by Jared; Paul did a smaller group of photographs of Margaret and Jared; and—even fewer in number—Margaret, of Paul and Jared. 13.  A related focus on how romantic partnerships shape creativity is Whitney Chadwick and Isabelle de Courtivron, eds., Significant Others: Creativity and Intimate Partnership (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993). 14.  Perlin to Lincoln Kirstein, August 10, 1947, box 19, folder 318, Lincoln Kirstein Papers, MGZMD 97, New York Public Library, Performing Arts Division. 15.  Bouloukos, “Survival Guide,” n.p. 16.  See Collaboration; Baptiste Pinteaux, an independent editor, curator, and publisher working in Paris, is currently conducting research into the color photographs. 17.  These are only a handful of examples of the many connections between the SAAM contact prints and the paintings; Margaret French also used photographs to explore compositions in her paintings (see, for instance, 1999.98.7.8; 1999.98.7.16 and 7.17; 1999.98.7.36, all of which relate to her work). 18.  One of these four shots was printed separately and at larger scale (Gitterman Gallery), suggesting that varied formats and uses were mined out of this archive. 19.  On the role of gossip “as a form of social activity which produces and maintains the filiations of artistic community,” see Gavin Butt, Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World 1948–1963 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 2.

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20.  And like earlier mass-produced cartes de visite, PaJaMa photographs were circulated, handled, and placed into albums where each album maker sequenced them in distinct ways, producing other, more personalized meanings. Glenway Wescott, Lincoln Kirstein, Donald Windham, and others as yet undiscovered collected PaJaMa photographs, often meticulously organizing them into curated albums and scrapbooks. One such album owned by Wescott has been preserved in its original state—now in the collection of the Keith de Lellis Gallery in New York—revealing the process by which members of the circle collected, displayed, and sequenced their PaJaMa photographs. 21.  Cadmus to Lynes, 1946 (month unclear), box 1, George Platt Lynes Papers, YCAL MSS 543, Beinecke Library, Yale University. 22.  As reported in Leddick, Intimate Companions, 223. 23.  Paul’s relationships with other men—in particular, the younger and more vulnerable George Tooker—were likewise fraught with the tensions of his emotional ties to Jared; Tooker left the relationship after feeling that he was unwilling to share Paul with Jared and Margaret any longer. Their romantic relationship broke up in 1949. See Leddick, Intimate Companions, 236. 24.  Margaret expressed the unequal distribution of emotional control in a small, undated painting, Circus Performers and Animals, in which a figure based on Jared balances with precarious ease on a ring above two other figures. His figure is in turn based on a small photograph (ca. 1940), included in Margaret’s donation to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, box D. 25.  As the language philosopher J. L. Austin (1911–1960) put it, “It takes two to make a truth.” See “John Langshaw Austin,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/austin-jl/. 26.  An undiluted expression of this is the pronouncement of the Abstract Expressionist painter Clyfford Still in 1951: “When I expose a painting, I would have it say, ‘here I am: this is my presence, my feeling, myself. Here I stand implacable, proud, alive, naked, unafraid.” See Carter Ratcliff, The Fate of a Gesture: Jackson Pollock and Postwar American Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), 76–77. See also Richard Shiff, “Expression: Natural, Personal, Pictorial,” in A Companion to Art Theory, ed. Paul Smith and Carolyn Wilde (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 159–72. 27.  Staged photography can be traced back to Henry Peach Robinson and Julia Margaret Cameron in England, as well as Wilhelm Von Gloeden (1856–1931),

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a German photographer who staged homoerotic and classicizing scenarios using young Sicilian models in Taormina. Von Gloeden’s work was well-known to both Cadmus and Kirstein. Into the twentieth century, staging occurred along a continuum of photographic practices involving some degree of “setup” and compositionalizing to get the intended effect. The international movements of Pictorialism and the Photo-Secession—exemplified by F. Holland Day, Gertrude Käsebier, Clarence White, Edward Steichen, and Edward Curtis—all involved degrees of intervention and painterly manipulations of the photographic emulsion to propel symbolic narrative or to achieve pictorial effects. By contrast, PaJaMa’s stagings involved—with few exceptions—no darkroom manipulations; interior staging was managed through placement of the figures, lighting, and mise-en-scène (the arrangement of elements within the scene to create a mood), while the more numerous outdoor scenes in nature were managed through a “directorial” approach discussed below. On the centrality of staging practices to the medium, see John Rohrbach, ed., Acting Out: Cabinet Cards and the Making of Modern Photography (Oakland: University of California Press, 2020). 28.  Roberta Smith, “PaJaMa,” New York Times, November 6, 2015, situates them between Dalí and the later work of Robert Mapplethorpe, while noting how PaJaMa also offers an expanded understanding of the New York art world of the 1930s and ’40s. 29.  On Surrealism’s migration to popular imagery and advertising, see Sandra Zalman, Consuming Surrealism in American Culture: Dissident Modernism (Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2015); Robert Lubar, “Salvador Dalí in America: The Rise and Fall of an Arch-Surrealist,” in Surrealism USA, ed. Isabelle Dervaux (New York: National Academy Museum, 2005), 20–29; and Keith Eggener, “ ‘An Amusing Lack of Logic’: Surrealism and Popular Entertainment,” American Art 7, no. 4 (Autumn 1993): 30–45. Giorgio de Chirico’s The Mysterious Baths (1938) may also have left its trace. 30.  This 1946 photograph was included in the Wescott album, p. 41 (Keith de Lellis Gallery), as well as in the George Tooker Papers in the Archives of American Art. Margaret’s shrouded figure appears elsewhere; see “Bernard Perlin and Margaret French” (1945), in Collaboration.

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31.  On the ways in which photography was enlisted in Surrealism, see Jennifer Mundy, ed., Surrealism: Desire Unbound (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Rosalind Krauss et al., Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism (Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art; New York: Abbeville Press, 1985). 32.  Glenway Wescott, “Illustrations of Mythology,” U.S. Camera, no. 2 (January–February 1939), excerpted in Jack Woody, George Platt Lynes Photographs, 1931–1955 (Los Angeles: Twelvetrees Press, 1980), 61–63; quote on p. 62. 33.  George Platt Lynes to Margaret French, July 18, 1946, box 1, “French, Margaret,” George Platt Lynes Papers, YCAL MSS 543, Beinecke Library, Yale University (emphasis added). The ellipsis is in the original letter. 34.  We might even speculate that before the single images were pasted into albums, they might have been used as “playthings”—to use Cadmus’s term—like tarot or other playing cards, arranged into variable configurations that contained different potential outcomes, or like film stills strung together in sequences. Thanks to Nick Mauss for this suggestion. 35.  Allen Ellenzweig, The Homoerotic Photograph: Male Images from Durieu/ Delacroix to Mapplethorpe (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 105, uses the term “directorial mode” to describe the staging of both Lynes and his German contemporary Herbert List. 36.  For a discussion of this in relation to a later group of staged photographs, see Pasid Aramphongphan, “Reading Jack Smith’s The Beautiful Book Reparatively,” Art Journal 78, no. 1 (Spring 2019): 30–47, especially p. 45. 37.  Paraphrase of Deborah Hawhee, “Kenneth Burke and American Studies: A Response to Giorgio Mariani,” American Literary History 21, no. 1 (Spring 2009): 126. 38.  Eleanor Munro, “Private Faces in Public Places: The Whitney Annual,” Art News 54 (December 1955): 67. 39.  Symbolic Realism was the title of an exhibition Kirstein curated in New York and London in 1950. Cadmus and George Tooker both disliked the term, however, along with the related term magic realism, featured in an earlier exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, in 1942. See Justin Spring, “An Interview with George Tooker,” American Art 16, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 60–81. 40.  My thanks to Bruce Robertson for this and many other insights drawn from dance history.

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Notes to Pages 97–102

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41.  Stephen Spender, The Temple (New York: Grove Press, 1988), 121, 123. The novel was completed in 1930 but published only in 1988. 42.  On this topic, see Bill Brown, “Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 2 (Winter 2006): 175–207; and Spyros Papapetros, On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 23. 43.  The image—one of several taken as part of a sequence that Wescott included in his album—is dated 1940 in Collaboration. 44.  An example is a travel photograph of George Tooker posed behind a headless statue, taken on the Appian Way outside Rome during a trip to Europe with Cadmus and Margaret and Jared French in 1949. George Tooker Papers, AAA, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Herbert List also “ ‘staged’ the human body as if it were a classical sculpture and, conversely, breathed life  into marble sculpture.” Matthias Harder, “Myth and Apocalypse: Views of Antiquity—Postwar Reality,” in The Essential Herbert List: Photographs 1930–1972 (Munich: Schirmer/Mosel, 2007), 108. 45.  Kenneth Burke’s Grammar of Motives (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1945) prefigured the turn toward a postmodern understanding of interpretation as provisional and tied to circumstantial conditions rather than as grounded in foundational notions of truth. Burke was interested fundamentally in the variability of interpretation itself, rather than in any particular set of beliefs about the world. 46.  See Wayne Booth, “Kenneth Burke’s Way of Knowing,” Critical Inquiry 1, no. 1 (September 1974): 4. 47.  “Scene” might also be expanded to include the global situation itself— that is, the context of World War II. See Wendell V. Harris, “Kenneth Burke,” Sewanee Review 96, no. 3 (Summer 1988): 460. 48.  A related image—“Margaret French and Jared French,” n.d., 6⁵⁄₈" × 4³⁄₈", courtesy DC Moore Gallery, New York—shows Margaret looking up through a triangular shape formed by the heavy braided rope she holds as it loops over a post. 49.  “Paul Cadmus and Glenway Wescott, Fire Island” (1938) is in the Glenway Wescott and Monroe Wheeler album, with annotations in blue ink by Wescott (Keith de Lellis Gallery, New York). This lighthouse appears elsewhere in PaJaMa’s works—see, for instance, Wescott album, p. 7, top—and locates these images at the southwest end of the island. It is also the likely source of the light-

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Notes to Pages 105–110

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house in Cadmus’s What I Believe (1947–48), where it is charged with symbolic importance. 50.  Meyer, “Threesomes,” observes the same triadic structure in the broader production of the artists around Kirstein. 51.  Such self-imposed limits were courted by others in the circle, as when Jared French proposed to write a novel—never realized—consisting of one continuous sentence. 52.  Essay by Lincoln Kirstein, George Platt Lynes: Portraits (1931–1952) (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 1960), n.p. 53.  The myth of Selene the moon goddess—who spies the sleeping form of the shepherd Endymion, who impregnates her in his sleep, spawning some fifty children—suggests one source of the scenario. “In the context of this childless triad, the story takes on a certain ironic ring; the spawn here might well be the artistic output the three produced through their playful collaborations.” My thanks to my colleague Nate Jones (email, September 1, 2018) for this and other possible readings of the image. 54.  On Kirstein’s infatuation with Paul, see Charles Kaiser, The Gay Metropolis: The Landmark History of Gay Life in America (New York: Grove Press, 1997), 43; noted as well by Meyer, “Threesomes,” 100. 55.  Lincoln Kirstein, appendix A, Tchelitchev (Santa Fe: Twelvetrees Press, 1994), 105–7. 56.  Along with stability, Rebecca Zorach, The Passionate Triangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 3, links the triangle to “hierarchy, coherence, . . . focus.” 57.  Zorach, Passionate Triangle, 2, raises a similar question at the beginning of her study about the relationship of “Love triangles to triangular composition.” Zorach links formal geometries—rooted in deep histories—with “stories, myths, . . . emotions, devotions, desires, and passions.” 58.  Lynes did a series involving “an erotic encounter among three men in a highly stylized bedroom setting,” which may have been his exploration of the triangulated relationship between Wescott, Wheeler, and himself. On this series, see Jonathan Weinberg, “Substitute and Consolation: The Ballet Photographs of George Platt Lynes," in Dance for a City: Fifty Years of the New York City Ballet, ed. Lynn Garofala (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 129–51: “ . . . the sequence reads

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Notes to Pages 112–117

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like a passionate ballet or pantomime—and seems just as choreographed.” Leddick, Naked Men: Pioneering Male Nudes, 20–21, also discusses the series. 59.  Rene Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 1–52, on “triangular desire.” On Girard, see James G. Williams, ed., The Girard Reader (New York: Crossroads, 1996); and Wolfgang Palaver, René Girard’s Mimetic Theory (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013). Girard’s theories also bridge the work of PaJaMa and that of Alfred Hitchcock in these years; David Humbert’s Violence in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock: A Study in Mimesis (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2017) uses Girard’s ideas about desire, violence, and mimetic behavior to analyze Hitchcock’s films. 60.  See Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 12. 61.  Palaver, René Girard’s Mimetic Theory, 59. 62.  Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 21. 63.  For Girard, the mediator represented the apex of the triangle; the base comprised the desiring subject and his/her desired object. See Deceit, Desire, and the Novel. 64.  Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 35, quoted in Palaver, René Girard’s Mimetic Theory, 39. 65.  The figure of the scapegoat drives Shirley Jackson’s short story “The Lottery” (1948), in The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, ed. Joyce Carol Oates (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). The thematics of violence is also an undercurrent in much symbolic realism of these same years. See Jeffrey Wechsler and Greta Berman, Realism and Realities: The Other Side of American Painting, 1940– 1960 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Art Gallery, 1981). 66.  Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 15. 67.  In his 1951 book The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, Herbert Marshall McLuhan used Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “Descent into the Maelstrom” as a parable of how to avoid being overwhelmed by the sheer annihilating force of information and media images, from journalism to comics and advertising, by fixing on the motions of the maelstrom from within (New York: Vanguard Press, 1951). 68.  Douglas Crimp, “Pictures,” October 8 (Spring 1979): 75–88.

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Notes to Pages 117–120

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In dex

Page numbers in italics denote illustrations, and notes are indicated by “n” followed by the note number. Abbott, Berenice, 22 Abstract Expressionism, 76 acquisitive mimesis, 118 aestheticism vs. eroticism, 11, 24–25, 73. See also homoeroticism aesthetic of immobility, 101–8, 103, 104, 106, 107 agency, individual and collaborative, 5, 13, 23, 81, 108–12 albums, as social media, 29, 91; family albums, 30, 79, 91. See also scrapbooks Arbus, Allen, 43 Arbus, Diane, 43 Auden, Wystan, 57 Avedon, Richard, 43, 45 Balanchine, George, 21, 48, 57 Balkin, Serge, 43, 44 ballet, 6–7, 15, 26, 30, 41, 45, 48, 53, 57 Barr, Alfred, 43

Beaton, Cecil: in Exhibit of New York Beauty (1933), 42; influence on Lynes, 31; Lynes’s opinion of, 44; portraits of Lynes, 17, 18, 19; scrapbook-making, 27, 28–29; visit with Greta Garbo, 70; in Vogue Photographers (1946), 43, 44 beauty, 21, 29, 30, 42, 98, 105 beefcake photography, 6 Benga, Féral, 54–55 Bishop, Bob, 48 Blumenfeld, Erwin, 22, 43, 44 Burke, Kenneth, 100, 108–9 Butler, John, 5 Cadmus, Fidelma. See Kirstein, Fidelma Cadmus Cadmus, Paul: gift portrait exchange, 33; on noncommercial nature of PaJaMa work, 75, 76; Point O View (1945), 82; portraying Christopher Isherwood,

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Cadmus, Paul (continued) 35; relationships within PaJaMa, 85–91; The Shower (1943), 82, 84; Stone Blossom (1939–40), 35–36, 37, 117; work in Lynes’s personal collection, 33, 71. See also PaJaMa Campbell, Sandy, 5 camp/camping, 11, 80 carte de visite (visiting card), 31–32, 33 Cartier-Bresson, Henri, 22, 66, 68 celebrity, 31–32, 66, 70 censorship, 25, 26 cinema, 29, 92, 99, 126n10 Cocteau, Jean, 30, 33, 57 codes, subcultural, 15, 17, 19, 39–41, 40, 85 Coffin, Clifford, 52 collaboration: intersubjectivity and, 4–5, 86, 91, 100–101; Lynes’s studio practice and, 21, 58–65; within PaJaMa, 11, 12, 75–77, 80–81, 91, 109; between PaJaMa and Lynes, 2, 7–8, 9, 10, 12, 59, 61, 65 Cornell, Joseph, 28, 42, 43 counterpublic, 29 Crimp, Douglas, 120 Dahl-Wolfe, Louise, 43 Dalí, Salvador, 96, 97 Daniels, Jimmie, 23 Der Kreis magazine, 26 desire: as artistic focus, 3, 4, 73, 82, 85–87, 97; structure of triangulation and, 117–19 drama, appropriation of, 80, 91–92, 93, 94, 95, 120–21 dramatistic pentad, 4, 108–12, 111 driftwood, as symbol, 10, 59–60, 61, 63, 64–65, 65, 96, 96–97, 103 Duchamp, Marcel, Large Glass, 43

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enactment, 4, 5, 53, 79, 100, 106, 111, 119 eroticism vs. aestheticism, 11, 24–25, 73. See also homoeroticism Evans, Walker, 22, 28 Ewing, Max, 28, 38–39 Exhibit of New York Beauty (1933), 42 fashion photography: Lynes’s work in, 22, 41–45, 44; nonfashion meanings within, 39–41, 40; performativity in, 120; symbiosis with avant-garde, 40, 42–43, 72 Fenn, Otto, 43 50 Photographs by George Platt Lynes (1934), 23 film noir, 91–92, 93, 94, 95 Fire Island, 4, 8, 59, 60, 62, 64, 75, 76, 77, 78, 81, 82, 87, 96, 98, 99, 106, 107, 109, 110, 111, 112, 115, 137n4, 144n49 Fisher, Hal, 73 Flandrin, Jean-Hippolyte, Jeune homme nu assis au bord de la mer, 45–46, 48 Fonssagrives, Lisa, 43, 66 Formes nues (1935), 22–23 Forster, E. M., 5, 77 Four Saints in Three Acts (1933), 22 Fouts, Denham, 23 Fraser, Nancy, 29 French, Jared: gift portrait exchange, 33; Murder (1942), 82; relationships within PaJaMa, 85–91. See also PaJaMa French, Margaret: parasol as symbol and, 97, 107, 114, 115; relationships within PaJaMa, 85–91. See also PaJaMa Freudian tropes, 97 Freund, Gisèle, 31 Frissel, Toni, 42 Garbo, Greta, 70 Genthe, Arnold, 42

Index

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George Platt Lynes (Tchelitchew), 55–57, 56, 58 Gide, André, 23, 70 gift economy: gift-giving, implications of, 7, 8, 13, 24, 26, 28, 32–39; gift portraits, 32–37, 34, 37 Girard, René, 117–19 “grammar of motives,” 108–12 Halsman, Philippe, 22 Harper’s Bazaar, 22, 72 Harrison, Francis Burton “Kiko,” 70–71, 71 Hartley, Marsden, 22, 71, 128n18 Hitchcock, Alfred, 92 Hocquenghem, Guy, 49 Hollywood: film noir, 62; headshot, 32; starlets, 32; star photography, 6 homoeroticism: ancient Greece, allusions to, 37, 102–5, 103, 104, 117; homoerotic tradition, references to, 91; Lynes’s classification within, 19, 25, 73; mediatization of homoerotic bodies, 29–30 Horst, Horst P., 22, 42, 43, 44 houses, as symbols, 108, 112 Hoyningen-Huene, George, 31 identity, entanglement of, 5–6, 80, 85–91 immobility, aesthetic of, 101–8, 103, 104, 106, 107 improvisation, 12, 53 intersubjectivity, 4–5, 52, 59, 91, 98, 101, 119, 120 intimacy, 3, 35, 51, 53, 62, 85 Isherwood, Christopher, 5, 35 Jeune homme nu assis au bord de la mer (Flandrin), 45–46, 48 Joffe, Constantin, 43, 44

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Kinsey, Alfred, 24–25 Kirstein, Fidelma Cadmus, 5, 39, 76, 115–16 Kirstein, Lincoln, 5, 21, 39, 76, 101–2, 113, 115, 116 Klee, Paul, 71 Large Glass (Duchamp), 43 Le Clercq, Tanaquil, 48, 49 Leggett Gallery, 22 Leigh, Dorian, 43, 44 Levinson, Charles “Le Vincent,” 54 Levy, Julien, 22, 23, 42 Liberman, Alexander, 45 List, Herbert, 102, 105 Lynes, George Platt: artistic exchange with PaJaMa, 7–8, 9, 10, 12, 59, 61, 65; attitude toward posterity, 8, 11, 72–73; book projects, 128n18; carte de visite, 31–32; coded portraits, 15, 17, 19; collaborative practices, 7–8, 9, 10, 58–65, 61, 63, 65, 135n73; as collector and collected artist, 130n30; commercial-artistic synergies, 38–39; early career, 21–25; eroticism vs. aestheticism and, 11, 24–25, 73; fashion work, 41–45, 44, 62; gift portraits and, 32–37, 34, 37; intermedia dialogues and relationships, 55–58, 56, 58; intersubjectivity and, 4–5, 51–52, 59; marketability of nude portraits, 126n10, 127n14; mischaracterization and limited visibility, 19–21, 72–74; narrative and, 98–99, 99; recombinatory artistic process, 45–50, 46, 47, 49, 50; scrapbook-making, 10, 27–30, 59, 61, 64–65, 65, 70; selfportrait as performance, 66–72, 67, 68, 69, 71; studio practice, 50–55, 62, 64; subverting categorization, 6–7, 25–27; upraised hand gesture, 132n51

Index

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Lynes, George Platt, works of: Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo program (1946–47), 16; Demus (1937), 45–46, 46; Francis Burton Harrison Jr. (1942), 70–71, 71; George Platt Lynes’ Office (undated), 66, 68; Gloria Swanson (1941), 62, 63; Margaret French (1940), 9; Nicholas Magallanes and Tanaquil Le Clercq in Jones Beach (1950), 48, 49; “Pavel Tchelitchew in studio with George Tichenor” (1942), 53, 55–57, 58; scrapbook pages (1941), 10, 59, 61; “self-portrait at 640 Madison Avenue” (undated), 68, 69; swimsuit advertisement (1937), 46–48, 47, 53; Two Hundred Portraits by George Platt Lynes (1941), 64, 65; untitled (undated), 48–49, 50, 53; untitled self-portrait collage (1935), 32–33, 34 Lynes, Russell, 51 made and found photography, 27 Magallanes, Nicholas, 16, 26, 47, 48, 49 male beauty, and photography, 29, 30 Martinez, José, 5, 82 Mauss, Marcel, 37 Maxwell, Dora, 70 McLuhan, Marshall, 120 mediatization of homoerotic bodies, 29–30 Meeres, Paul, 30 melodrama, 91–92, 93, 94, 95 ménage à trois, 5, 11, 76, 117 Metropolitan Museum of Art, 6 Meyer, Richard, 25 Miller, Lee, 22, 42 mimemic desire, 117–19 modernism: Lynes’s classification within, 20–21; performance photography,

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impact on, 13, 120–21; public vs. nonpublic practices and, 28–29 Moncion, Francisco, 26 Moore, Marianne, 28 Munro, Eleanor, 101 Murals by American Painters and Photographers (1932), 22 Museum of Modern Art, 21, 22, 43 myth, 26, 27, 70, 98, 100, 113, 114, 115, 120, 128n18, 129n20, 145nn53,57 Nadar, Felix, 66, 68 narrative: PaJaMa’s use of, 98–100, 99, 120; symbolic action and, 108–9 Neoclassicism, 37, 45, 46, 102–5, 103, 104, 117 The Newer Super Realism (1931), 22 New York City Ballet, 21, 26 Noguchi, Isamu, 23 nonreproductive social worlds, 3, 119 nudes: in characterizing Lynes’s work, 19–21, 71, 71; early attempts to publicly exhibit, 26; eroticism vs. aestheticism, 11, 24–25, 73; heteronormative expectations of, 23; marketability and circulation, 126n10, 127n14; narrative elements in, 98. See also portraits NUS: La beauté de la femme (1933), 22 Ogle, James, Portrait of George Platt Lynes in His Studio, 66, 67 Owens, Craig, 73 PaJaMa: aesthetic of immobility, 101–8, 103, 104, 106, 107, 144n44; artistic exchange with Lynes, 7–8, 9, 10, 12, 59, 61, 65; attitude toward posterity, 8; categories of work, 81–84, 83, 84; collaboration within, 80–81, 91;

Index

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drama and popular genres, appropriation of, 11–12, 80, 91–92, 93, 94, 95, 120–21; driftwood, use of, 10, 59–60, 61, 63, 64–65, 65, 96, 96–97, 103; extant scholarship on, 139n9; as figurative painters, 11; interpersonal dynamics, 85–91, 141nn23,24; intersubjectivity and, 4–5, 91, 100–101, 120–21; narrative, use of, 98–100, 99, 120; “PaJaMa” name, 6, 75, 80, 87, 137n3; photograph quality, 138n7; scrapbooks and albums, 28, 91, 141n20; staging, use of, 76–79, 78, 96–97, 99, 99–100, 111–12; Surrealism and, 92–98, 96; symbolic action, 4, 100, 108–12, 111, 120; triangular structure, 37, 88, 112–19, 114, 115 PaJaMa, works of: “Fidelma, Margaret, and Paul” (1940s), 87, 88, 115–16; “George Tooker, Jared French, and Monroe Wheeler” (1947), 102, 103; “George Tooker, Margaret French, and Paul Cadmus, Provincetown” (1947), 92, 93; “Glenway Wescott and draped figure, Fire Island” (1940), 105, 106; “Jared, Margaret, and Paul” (1946), 107; “Jared French” (1940), 82, 83; “Jared French, New York City” (1946), 87, 89; “Jared French in Margaret Hoening family home” (undated), 92, 94; “Margaret and Paul, Fire Island” (1944), 4, 87; “Margaret French, Fire Island” (1944), 96, 96–97; “Margaret French, George Tooker, and Jared French, Nantucket” (1946), 113, 114; “Margaret French and Jared French, Nantucket” (1946), 92, 95; “Margaret French and Paul Cadmus, Provincetown” (1947), 88–89, 90; “Paul

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Cadmus, Margaret French, and Bernard Perlin, Fire Island” (1938), 109–10, 111; “Paul Cadmus and Jared French, Fire Island” (1941), 77, 78; “Paul Cadmus and Margaret French, Fire Island” (1939), 113–15, 115; The Shower (1943), 82, 84; “Staging of a scene, with Jared French, Glenway Wescott, and others” (1941), 99, 99–100 parasol, as symbol, 97, 107, 114, 115 Park Place Bookshop, 30–31 Penn, Irving, 43, 44, 45 performance: affirming group identities, 4–5; American modernism and, 13; photography as, 3, 12, 91, 120–21. See also staged photography Perlin, Bernard, 81, 109–10, 111 “photogenic,” 32 Photographie (1933, 1936, 1939), 22–23 photography: artist-subject recognition, 19, 37–38; carte de visite, 31–32; commercial-artistic synergies, 39–41, 40; daguerreotypes, 85; exchanged as social currency, 38; gift portraits, 32–37, 34, 37; hand-tohand circulation of, 31, 52; intersubjectivity within, 4–5, 91, 100–101, 120–21; market for, 28, 37, 38, 43, 79, 126, 127, 128, 138n6; modern sexual identities and, 29–30; as performance and role-play, 3, 12, 91, 120–21; postal distribution, 28; reciprocal portraits, 19, 55–57, 56, 58; in reenacting power dynamics, 117; regulation of queer culture and, 1–3, 126n10; self-portraits, 32–33, 34, 66–72, 67, 68, 69, 71; snapshots, 32, 79, 82, 85, 138n6; social contract within, 12, 51–52; as subversive

Index

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photography (continued) intervention, 15–19, 17, 21, 39–41, 40, 52; as symbolic action, 4, 100, 108–12, 111; “truth value” of, 53, 79. See also fashion photography; Lynes, George Platt; nudes; PaJaMa; scrapbooks; staged photography Picasso, Pablo, 71 The Pilgrim Hawk (Wescott), 36 play, playfulness, games, 5, 8, 12, 55, 75, 80, 88, 89, 112, 113 popular genres, appropriation of, 80, 91–92, 93, 94, 95, 120–21 pornography vs. art, 24 Porter, Katherine Anne, 38, 129n21 Portrait of George Platt Lynes (Beaton), 18 Portrait of George Platt Lynes in His Studio (Ogle), 66, 67 portraits: coded, 15, 17, 19; gifted, 32–37, 34, 37, 130n34; market negotiability of, 38; reciprocal, 19, 55–57, 56, 58; self-portraits, 32–33, 34, 66–72, 67, 68, 69, 71. See also nudes Pound, Ezra, 28 public vs. private: artist’s studio and, 50–52, 62; regulation of private life, 1–3; scrapbook as public-making media, 27–30; subcultural codes, 15, 17, 19, 39–41, 40, 85 queer culture: emergence of photography and, 29–30; exchange of portraits within, 35; historicization and contemporary conceptions of, 25; performative excess and genre mixing, 80; queer world-making, 2–3, 5, 119; regulation and restriction of, 1–3, 126n10, 128n17; subcultural codes, 15, 17, 19, 39–41, 40; triad structure and, 113

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Rauschenberg, Robert, 30 Rawlings, John, 43, 44 Ray, Man, 31, 42 reciprocal portraits, 19, 55–57, 56, 58 Robbins, Jerome, 48 Roy, Pierre, 71 Sansone, Tony, 30 Scavullo, Francesco, 43–44 scrapbooks: as dialogic activity, 129n21; early practices, 129n22; Lynes’s work, 10, 59, 61, 64–65, 65, 70; PaJaMa’s work, 28, 91, 141n20; as publicmaking media, 27–30 self-portraits, 32–33, 34, 66–72, 67, 68, 69, 71 sexuality. See desire; homoeroticism; queer culture Shawn, Ted, 102 Sherman, Cindy, 120 social media, albums and scrapbooks as, 27–30, 91 Spender, Stephen, The Temple, 105 staged photography: early history, 55, 59, 99, 99–100, 141n27; PaJaMa’s use of staging, 5, 7, 11, 28, 76–79, 81, 85, 86, 88, 91, 92, 96–97, 105, 107, 109, 111–12, 120, 141n27 Steichen, Edward, 42 Stein, Gertrude, 22, 30, 38, 54 Stettheimer, Florine, 28 Steward, Samuel, 33 Stonewall, 25 Stravinsky, Igor, 57 Surrealism, 6, 22, 24, 43, 45, 46, 92, 97-98, 142n29, 143n31, 145n35 symbolic action, 4, 100, 108–12, 111, 120 Symbolic Realism, 101–2 symbolism: damaged structures, 108, 112; driftwood, 10, 59–60, 61, 63, 64–65,

Index

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65, 96, 96–97, 103; parasols, 97, 107, 114, 115; upraised hand gesture, 132n51

Van Vechten, Carl, 22, 27, 28, 42 View magazine, 42 violence and desire, 117–19 Vogue, 22, 72 Vogue Photographers (Penn), 43, 44 Voinquel, Raymond, 31 voyeurism and desire, 88, 112–15, 115

Waugh, Thomas, 29 Weinberger, Karlheinz, 26 Wescott, Barbara Harrison, 70 Wescott, Glenway: gift portrait exchange, 33; “Glenway Wescott and draped figure, Fire Island” (1940), 105, 106; Lynes’s nudes and, 26, 127n14; as model, 5; on photography without plot, 98; relationship with Lynes, 21, 35–36, 37, 117, 125n4; relationship with PaJaMa, 75; on restrictions as homosexual author, 128n17; “Staging of a scene, with Jared French, Glenway Wescott, and others” (1941), 99, 99–100; symbolic action and, 110 Weston, Edward, 42 Wheeler, Monroe: “George Tooker, Jared French, and Monroe Wheeler” (1947), 102, 103; gift portrait exchange, 32, 33, 34; Lynes’s nudes and, 26; as model, 5; relationship with Lynes, 21, 35–36, 37, 117, 125n4; relationship with PaJaMa, 75 White, Minor, 28 Williams, Tennessee, 5 Wilson, Bronwen, 29 Windham, Donald, 20, 27, 42, 53–54, 71 window display, 43 world-making, queer, 2–3, 5, 119

Wadsworth Athenaeum, 22 Warhol, Andy, 30, 52

Youths (List), 102 Yow, Alexander Jensen, 39–41, 41

Tchelitchew, Pavel, 33, 42, 54–55, 56, 66, 71 The Temple (Spender), 105 Thomson, Virgil, 22 Tichenor, George, 57, 58 Tobias, Herbert, 26 Tooker, George: “George Tooker, Jared French, and Monroe Wheeler” (1947), 102, 103; “George Tooker, Margaret French, and Paul Cadmus, Provincetown” (1947), 92, 93; “Margaret French, George Tooker, and Jared French, Nantucket” (1946), 113, 114; as model, 5; relationship with Paul Cadmus, 75 triangles and triangulation, 37, 88, 112–19, 114, 115 U.S. Camera magazine, 26, 36

153

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Index

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a b o u t t h e au t h o r s

K e n Ok i ish i

n i c k m au s s is an artist whose recent exhibitions include Transmissions at the Whitney Museum and Intricate Others at Museu Serralves.

e r ic c h a m be r s

a n g e l a m i l l e r has published widely on nineteenth- and twentiethcentury American arts and culture. She is author of the prize-winning The Empire of the Eye.

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Founded in 1893,

University of California Press publishes bold, progressive books and journals on topics in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences—with a focus on social justice issues—that inspire thought and action among readers worldwide. The UC Press Foundation raises funds to uphold the press’s vital role as an independent, nonprofit publisher, and receives philanthropic support from a wide range of individuals and institutions—and from committed readers like you. To learn more, visit ucpress.edu/supportus.

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