Nick Mauss and Angela Miller’s Body Language: The Queer Staged Photographs of George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa looks at the work of the influential photographer George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa, a collective formed in 1937 in New York City by the American artists Paul Cadmus, and Jared and Margaret French. Following in the footsteps of David Leddick’s Intimate Companions (2000), the authors trace the artistic, emotional, and sexual entanglements that connected these close-knit figures. The book is organized into two essays. The first authored by Mauss is dedicated to Lynes, and the second by Miller looks to PaJaMa’s collaborative work. Both writers are concerned with the staged figurative photographic tableaux that both Lynes and PaJaMa produced from the 1930s onwards, with a particular focus on works that were made for friends rather than for exhibition or commercial consumption. These playful, experimental photographs would be handed to people at dinner parties, stored in montaged scrapbooks, used to sketch out paintings, or subbed into Lynes’s commercial advertising jobs as in-jokes for those in the know. 

The photographic works of Lynes and PaJaMa that are discussed are formally connected by a focus on the body, eroticism, and highly theatrical staging, incorporating the use of studio props in the case of Lynes, and the natural materials and detritus that PaJaMa came across on their regular holidays to Fire Island. Mauss and Miller see these staged photographic worlds as ways of dramatizing, memorializing, and circulating nonnormative patterns of intimacy, defined by queer relationships, homoerotic desire, and the dynamics of nonmonogamy, specifically ménage à trois in the case of PaJaMa. Both authors frame the performativity of the images as a strategy for expressing relationships that were not permitted in the public sphere, whilst tracing the distribution of the images to map networks of friendship, desire, and collaboration. 

Intersubjectivity is a striking term. The Oxford Reference defines it as “the process of sharing experiences, knowledge, understandings, and expectations with others.” Although there is no definitive historical frame given, the majority of the works discussed in the essays were made from the late 1930s to the late 1940s and early 1950s. Whilst strict periodization is not important, it seems that both Miller and Mauss are writing into a history of modernism that had not yet become hegemonic when the works were being made. Between the “older topos of the autonomous self” and a history of American modernism staged by the tensions between “abstraction and figuration,” sits the mass subject of the late 19th and early 20th century. If intersubjectivity is defined as sharing knowledge and expectations with others, then that experience in the early 20th century was situated in the publics created by new technologies of collectively consumed mass media and was played out in the struggle between competing political visions for society: communism, socialism, fascism, capitalism and so forth.

In America specifically, modernization and its attendant “mass public” rapidly changed the social and urban fabric of the nation. The growing militancy of Black radicalism and labor was empowered by antifascist and anticolonial struggles abroad. During the Great Depression, these struggles formed a wider movement in the US over the 1930s and early 1940s that was defined by the encounter between a powerful democratic social movement and its cultural formation—a broad alliance of radical intellectuals and artists working with the new social apparatus of culture and media. Cadmus and the Frenches developed their artistic practices during the Popular Front. In fact, Cadmus was one of the first artists employed by the New Deal government arts programs. His infamous painting The Fleet’s In (1934) was commissioned as part of the Public Works of Art Project. Before it could be exhibited, a retired naval officer demanded its confiscation for “unwarranted insult to the enlisted personnel of our Navy,” in protest against the painting’s debauched sexual overtones and homoerotic staging. Cadmus received hate mail after the scandal, reportedly accusing him of promoting “communist Jew culture” (stand-ins for anything perceived as subversive). 

The Fleet’s In foreshadows some of the formal concerns of PaJaMa’s photographs: the focus on bodies and erotism captured in a tableaux form, but it also references the era’s interest in muralism and the depiction of working-class people engaging in both labor and leisure. These traditions carry their own language of social interconnectedness, lust, and heightened emotional states (think Vivian Gornick, Paul Strand, Langston Hughes). Whilst I’m not suggesting that the works Miller discusses should be understood as directly speaking to the era’s political struggles, I do think the historical significance of the new role for the artist as worker for the state, or as member of a class, or a race, or a party that underscored that moment of American Popular Front culture would have impacted PaJaMa’s understanding of photography as a tool through which to experiment with new ways of living and being together. Even as the forms of political and artistic organization the Popular Front heralded were being slowly supplanted over the late 1940s and 1950s, the centrality of mediation and sociality in Lynes and PaJaMa’s presentation of the human body bears the hallmarks of the technical and social transformations that characterize the era. By omitting this history, the authors risk staking their arguments around the same claims to artistic genius and autonomy that they claim to push against.

Both Mauss and Miller argue for an important and often overlooked aspect of American modernism in their essays: its imbrication with commercial culture. The introduction notes that “[b]oth artists suspend 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 and opened toward other futures” (13). In this way, both authors point to the interconnection of commerce, record, and entertainment that defines photography and its uneasy relationship to the history of art. Many of the now-renowned photographers associated with American modernism, like Walker Evans, were working for the government and for magazines, producing images that would appear simultaneously in state archives, the illustrated press, and on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art. The mobility of meaning that characterizes Evans’s photography is instructive here. Photographs taken in Cuba appeared uncaptioned in his genre-defining modernist photobook American Photographs (1938). These were placed alongside photographs taken under the instruction of the American government. This play was intentional. Like Evans’s own sexuality at the time, his photographs are ambivalent, ambiguous, and highly contingent.

Meaning in photography is contextual and relational, it cannot be ensured that its message remains bound to personal sentiment, no matter how intimate the original encounter. Mauss points to how Lynes played with this irreverence, subbing in images he’d made for friends and lovers into ad campaigns, shifting meaning and purpose from personal affections to commercial use. Similarly, Miller points to PaJaMa’s explorations of archetypes and symbolism drawn from Jungian theories of psychology. They worked with photographic technologies to dramatize the mobility of identities and associations that undergird what it means to be modern.  

In the introduction, the reader is led to understand that “the dense networks of mutual cross-media influence described in the following essays suggest that PaJaMa and Lynes’ anticipated postmodern and contemporary modes of artistic production, collaboration, and self-presentation” (13). This may well be true, but they also document a disappearing world, one which we have lost the categories to describe. As sexuality became more rigidly codified over the course of the 20th century, these photographic works point to the way in which both normativity and meaning are constructed historically (See George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, 1994). By situating PaJaMa and Lynes more fully in their historical moment, the authors could have revealed them to be even more richly involved in the struggles and pleasures of their own times, times that cut between vibrant experimentation and crushing political defeat. The work is interesting not because they were unique figures but because—like many others— they were working through the contradictions of their own lives, conditioned as they were by technical and historical realities. PaJaMa and Lynes’s work helps us to see that the categories we use to think with are not eternal— that life has been different— and that it can be made and remade as Mauss and Miller point out, in new ways. Making this a historical argument, as well as a personal one, would allow the reshaping of identity to be something available to all people, rather than the foresight of a chosen few.