Body Language: The Queer Staged Photographs of George Platt Lynes and Pajama Volume 7

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.

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 the author of the prize-winning The Empire of the Eye.