Body Language: The Queer Staged Photographs of George Platt Lynes and PaJaMaExamining 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. |
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advertisement aesthetic album American Art Angela Miller Figure Anthony W artists Balanchine ballet Beinecke Library body Cadmus's camera Cecil Beaton Christopher Isherwood circulated collaboration collection Courtesy of DC Courtesy of Keith culture dancers DC Moore Gallery desire driftwood emotional enact erotic Estate of George exhibition fashion photographer film Fire Island friends gaze Gelatin silver print genres George Platt Lynes George Tooker gift Girard Glenway Wescott graphs Henri Bendel Herbert List homoerotic homosexual images Jared French Keith de Lellis Kinsey Institute Leddick Lellis Gallery Lincoln Kirstein lives lovers Lynes's magazine male nudes Margaret and Paul Margaret French ment Modern Art Monroe Wheeler Museum of Modern Nick Mauss Notes to Pages painter paintings PaJaMa Drama PaJaMa photographs Paul Cadmus play portrait posed Press props queer scenarios scene scrapbook sexual shape space subjects Surrealism Tchelitchew tion tographs triangle Vintage silver print visual York