Body Language: The Queer Staged Photographs of George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa(7 Defining Moments in Photography)

Examining this innovative collaboration as a turning point in the history of photography and in queer American culture.   Body Language is the first in-depth study of the extraordinary interplay between photographer George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa (painters Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret Hoening French). These enigmatic photographs—issuing from intimate private networks and queer sexualities—helped ground friendships and also found their way into the public worlds of fashion and fame.   Nick Mauss and Angela Miller offer timely readings of how practices of staging, collaboration, and psychological enactment through the body arced across the boundaries of art and life, private and public worlds, anticipating contemporary social media. For these audacious artists, the camera was used not to capture, but to actively perform. Renouncing photography's conventional role as mirror of the real, Lynes and PaJaMa energized forms of worldmaking via a new social framing of the self.

Table of Contents:
Introduction  Anthony W. Lee, Nick Mauss, and Angela Miller The Uses of Photographs  Nick Mauss PaJaMa Drama Angela Miller Notes Index

About the Author :
Nick Mauss is an artist whose recent exhibitions include Transmissions at the Whitney Museum and Intricate Others at Museu Serralves.   Angela Miller has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American arts and culture. She is author of the prize-winning The Empire of the Eye.  

Review :
"Body Language is an absorbing book for those who take photography and queer representation seriously." "In a sense a gift image itself, Body Language provides a fascinating, deeply researched background for the enigmatic works these queer artists left behind, helping to illuminate their contributions for generations to come." "Mauss and Miller’s two essays live up to the controlled, evocative complexity of these images. As they each brush up against each others’ ideas, the conversation between their essays reproduces the intersubjective enmeshment of these artists, their lives, and their works. In their shared resonances, the essays feel like objects circulating between the writers and ourselves the readers, for us to touch and read and share, as in the haptic experience of paging through a scrapbook assembled by friends. The metaphorical touching of these essays offers a method for bringing these artists out of history, for helping us to see, to imagine, almost to touch, a new forest to live in."