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.

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

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.