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. "An absorbing book for those who take photography and queer representation seriously.... Mauss' sensitive readings...shrewdly decode some of Lynes' images as transmitted to the queer viewer. Miller describes Paul, Jared, and Margaret as 'a queer network that experimented with new forms of private life enacted in daily exchanges, and issuing in new collaborative practices.'" —Allen Ellenzweig, author of George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye, in The Gay and Lesbian Review "Body Language brings new critical discourse to representations of queerness in American Modernism...Both essays explore the social roles these images played when circulated among queer artists as well as their relationship to mass media, and how they not only informed other artworks made by their participants but also reflected a network of queer culture in America between the two world wars." -Matthew Leifheit, Aperture "Body Language offers a study of queer American artists in contact with modernist avant-garde movements like Surrealism, but striking out in new directions in their lives and works[...]created through collaboration and picturing queer social configurations[...] Mauss and Miller's two essays live up to the controlled, evocative complexity of these images. As they each brush up against each other's ideas, the conversation between their essays reproduces the intersubjective enmeshment of these artists, their lives, and their works." --Philip Griffith, The Brooklyn Rail "As the first in-depth analysis of the relationship between the works of Lynes and PaJaMa, Body Language offers a rigorous and enjoyable study that features the authors' extensive archival research, sensitive close analysis, and fruitful conversations with one another. Exploring the grammar of these photographers' staged images, the authors examine how the embodied actions in these photographs disrupted social binaries of male/female, gay/straight, individual/collective, self/other, and animate/inanimate[...]The authors draw on the fullness of their artists' archives to situate their practices historically in ways that account for the forces of heteronormativity and homophobia in 1940s America while also stressing the imaginative ways that these artists disrupted the restrictions of the closet and exceeded the limits of their temporal moment in order to map what Lynes presciently called a 'future history of art.'"
-Miriam Kienle, PANORAMA: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art " Body Language  retrieves a visual archive of desire from the 1930s and 1940s that exceeds any simple binary of gay/straight, male/female, or individual/collective. Photographs by George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa encompass lavish pleasures and possibilities that can only be understood as 'queer'—as beautifully non-normative and knowingly performative. Nick Mauss and Angela Miller dedicate their book to a 'future history of art.' One can only hope that an art history of the future learns to be as loving and attentive to the queer visual past as Mauss and Miller. If it does,  Body Language  will be part of the reason why."—Richard Meyer, author of  Master of the Two Left Feet: Morris Hirshfield Rediscovered "This is an important work of new scholarship focused on the interwoven relationships and collaborative lives and works of George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa. Collaboration and coauthoring strategies have become even more central to many contemporary practices in staged photography, and so as we contend with both the precedents and limitations of generations past, Body Language provides a crucial historic reference point for a new, expansive world built by queer image-makers."—Paul Mpagi Sepuya, artist "With their attentive readings that span photographs, intimate relationships, and archival materials, Mauss and Miller furnish fresh understandings of mid-twentieth-century collective artistic practices. Together they brilliantly chart the course for a new, collaborative, and queer art history—one that is as delightful as it is rigorous."—Julia Bryan-Wilson, author of Louise Nevelson's Sculpture: Drag, Color, Join, Face "Fire Island—this thin strip of sand, thirty-two miles long, off the coast of Long Island—has been a place of play and a s