Body Language (Paperback)

Paperback. 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 photographsissuing from intimate private networks and queer sexualitieshelped 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. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. …