“I’ve done my best work when I’ve worked only for pleasure.”
TRQ: George Platt Lynes, Born April 15, 1907
Fashion and fine art photographer George Platt Lynes was born in East Orange, New Jersey. He graduated from the Berkshire School in Massachusetts in 1925 and travelled to Paris where he befriended writers Gertrude Stein and Monroe Wheeler, and art curator Glenway Wescott. He had long-lasting affairs with Wescott and Wheeler, in particular, who offered him personal and professional support. Lynes then attended Yale University in 1926 for one year before moving to New York City to begin a literary career.
After opening a bookstore in Englewood, New Jersey, Lynes began taking photographs of friends to display in the store. When he returned to Paris with Wescott and Wheeler in 1927, he developed friendships with artist Jean Cocteau and art critic Julien Levy, who would go on to exhibit Lyne’s photographs in his New York gallery in 1932. Also, in that year, Lynes was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s first photography exhibitions.
Afterwards, Lynes was commissioned by Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Town & Country. His fashion photography together with his photographs of dancers with the American Ballet, established Lynes as one of the era’s most vital creatives. However, his private collection of nude male portraits is considered to be some of his most important work.
With friends, models and actors, Lynes worked in private on photographs that could have potentially exposed all involved to criminal prosecution on obscenity charges. Because of the homophobic policing of gay communities after World War II, any public exhibit of Lynes’ male nudes would have been inconsiderable. Yet for twenty years, he continued with photographing male nudes. Eventually he befriended Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey, founder of the Kinsey Institute.
In 1955 Lynes was diagnosed with lung cancer. By then he had worked to escape years of mismanaged finances, exacerbated by the rise of Richard Avedon, whose more spontaneous photography made the work of Lynes seem dated. Lynes died on December 6, 1955 at New York Hospital. Unknown to the public for years, Lynes left hundreds of photographs, and thousands of negatives to the Kinsey’s Institute for Sex Research.
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