Body Language - (Defining Moments in Photography) by Nick Mauss & Angela Miller & Anthony W Lee (Paperback)

About the Book

"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"--

Book Synopsis

Examines early practices of staged photography in visualizing queer forms of relation.

Body Language is the first in-depth study of the extraordinary interplay between George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa (Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret Hoening French). Nick Mauss and Angela Miller offer timely readings of how their 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. Using the camera not to capture, but to actively perform, they renounced photography's conventional role as mirror of the real, energizing forms of world-making via a new social framing of the self.

From the Back Cover

"Body Language retrieves a visual archive of desire from the 1930s and 1940s that exceeds any simple binary of gay/straight, male/female, or individual/collective. Photographs by George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa encompass lavish pleasures and possibilities that can only be understood as 'queer'--as beautifully non-normative and knowingly performative. Nick Mauss and Angela Miller dedicate their book to a 'future history of art.' One can only hope that an art history of the future learns to be as loving and attentive to the queer visual past as Mauss and Miller. If it does, Body Language will be part of the reason why."--Richard Meyer, author of Master of the Two Left Feet: Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered

"This is an important work of new scholarship focused on the interwoven relationships and collaborative lives and works of George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa. Collaboration and coauthoring strategies have become even more central to many contemporary practices in staged photography, and so as we contend with both the precedents and limitations of generations past, Body Language provides a crucial historic reference point for a new, expansive world built by queer image-makers."--Paul Mpagi Sepuya, artist

"With their attentive readings that span photographs, intimate relationships, and archival materials, Mauss and Miller furnish fresh understandings of mid-twentieth-century collective artistic practices. Together they brilliantly chart the course for a new, collaborative, and queer art history--one that is as delightful as it is rigorous."--Julia Bryan-Wilson, author of Louise Nevelson's Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face

"Fire Island--this thin strip of sand, thirty-two miles long, off the coast of Long Island--has been a place of play and a sanctuary for the queer community for decades. PaJaMa's and George Platt Lynes's pioneering photographic work captured the unique spirit of this place. This volume underlines the importance of safe spaces for the queer community to be free to express their identities and create shared experiences of intimacy."--Wolfgang Tillmans, artist

"This blazingly intelligent examination of photographer George Platt Lynes and the trio of painters whose complex collaborations through photography and queer performance were attributed to PaJaMa is filled with telling details and brings us new considerations of how these artists challenged older ideas of cisgender authorship, hierarchies, and identities. Read this volume and marvel at the wealth of interfiliated pathways in interpreting creative practices as forms of queer world-making."--Roxana Marcoci, David Dechman Senior Curator and Acting Chief Curator of Photography, Museum of Modern Art

Review Quotes

"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."-- "The Brooklyn Rail"

"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."-- "Aperture"

"Body Language is an absorbing book for those who take photography and queer representation seriously."-- "The Gay & Lesbian Review"

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.