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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.
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.
168 pages, Hardcover
Published November 7, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 5, 2024
This first tandem study of George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa is an important development in the scholarship on these artists. Both essays by Nick Mauss and Angela Miller offer new insight and information and are quite enjoyable. Highly recommended!
April 14, 2024
Mauss & Miller's short monograph analyzes the work of the photographer George Platt Lynes and the work of the collective: PaJaMa (Paul Cadmus; Jared French & Margaret Hoening French). The book argues for the importance of their conceptions of self and identity and how these ideas influenced their work and each other.
Richard Meyer has argued against the misuse of historical examples of queer American culture to confirm contemporary conceptions of queerness, stating that “it remains crucial to contend with the difficulty of addressing historical moments prior to Stonewall… which alternative forms of sexual life were quite differently organized, named, and depicted they are today.” [15. Richard Meyer, “Lookout: On Queer American Art and History,” in A Companion to American Art, ed., John Davis, Jennifer A. Greenhill, and Jason D. LaFountain (West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 436] 25
A fluid dynamic between public and non-public practises was integral to the conception of ‘modern art,’ and stands in Mark contrast to a contemporary conception of art as defined primarily through accelerated transactions and public overexposure….Lynes, along with countless young men with access to cameras, became an agent of what Thomas Waugh has labelled “the mediazation of the homoerotic male body.” [26. Waugh, Hard to Imagine, 28] 29
The open movement of ideas and borrowed (and even distorted) influences an all directions suggests that “originality” was not proprietary but was surrendered to, and transformed by, a constantly evolving conditional play. 59
Richard Meyer has argued against the misuse of historical examples of queer American culture to confirm contemporary conceptions of queerness, stating that “it remains crucial to contend with the difficulty of addressing historical moments prior to Stonewall… which alternative forms of sexual life were quite differently organized, named, and depicted they are today.” [15. Richard Meyer, “Lookout: On Queer American Art and History,” in A Companion to American Art, ed., John Davis, Jennifer A. Greenhill, and Jason D. LaFountain (West Sussex: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 436] 25
A fluid dynamic between public and non-public practises was integral to the conception of ‘modern art,’ and stands in Mark contrast to a contemporary conception of art as defined primarily through accelerated transactions and public overexposure….Lynes, along with countless young men with access to cameras, became an agent of what Thomas Waugh has labelled “the mediazation of the homoerotic male body.” [26. Waugh, Hard to Imagine, 28] 29
The open movement of ideas and borrowed (and even distorted) influences an all directions suggests that “originality” was not proprietary but was surrendered to, and transformed by, a constantly evolving conditional play. 59
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews