Anna Thomasson’s ingenious and beguiling book opens with an image of her artist-lover subjects in repose. Here, in Lee Miller’s photograph from 1937, five guests sprawl on the sun-­dappled grass around a makeshift table. The men are clothed. Their two women companions are half-naked and unashamedly available. Both of the women are laughing; one beams as she watches the other being kissed. How should we read the scene, Thomasson asks? Are we looking at an image of male exploitation or one of equality and sexual freedom, even of rebellion and defiance?

Global race war was on the horizon in the late 1930s. Almost all the events in Thomasson’s book take place in an increasingly racist country, but there’s no sense of discrimination at work in a group that includes the black dancer from Guadeloupe Ady Fidelin, her Jewish-American lover and photographer Man Ray, and her more occasional lover Roland Penrose, the well-born Quaker and ardent Surrealist. Penrose’s idol Picasso isn’t in the frame on this occasion. He’s elsewhere, perhaps in Antibes with his partner and fellow artist Dora Maar. Possibly he’s pondering the great work in which Dora will feature as an observer: Night Fishing at Antibes.

Thomasson’s inspired idea has been to track the shifting configurations of this influential friendship group through some of the thousands of deceptively informal photographs taken by Miller, her former lover and lifelong friend Man Ray, and Eileen Agar. All date from the same summer, when this group of highly sexed