Body Language: Nick Mauss and Angela Miller in Conversation

Join artist Nick Mauss and scholar Angela Miller for a conversation about their new book, Body Language: The Queer Staged Photographs of George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa (2023), the first in-depth study of the extraordinary interplay between the photography of George Platt Lynes and PaJaMa (Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret Hoening French). Together the authors share their readings of how both Platt Lynes and PaJaMa’s practices of staging, collaboration, and psychological enactment through the body swept across their art and lives, private and public worlds, and in many regards anticipated social media. The discussion explores how these artists used the camera not to capture, but to actively perform and thus to energize a new social framing of the self. Their conversation also traces the importance of Fire Island as a space for queer sociality and a specific site of artistic production, as well as the role that natural and man-made props played in the porous collaboration between the artists. Drew Sawyer, Sondra Gilman Curator of Photography, moderates the conversation.