George Platt Lynes

George Platt Lynes was born 1907 in East Orange, New Jersey to moderately affluent parents. His younger brother was the historian Joseph Russell Lynes, Jr. Lynes spent his childhood in New Jersey but attended the Berkshire School in Massachusetts, where he was a classmate of the writer Lincoln Kirstein. He was sent to Paris in 1925 with the idea of better preparing him for college. In Paris, he met Réne Crevel, Man Ray, and Gertrude Stein, with whom he began a decade-long correspondence. Largely self-taught, Lynes eventually entered Yale University in 1926 and left after his first year to move to New York.

Lynes with Jonathan Tichenor, Fire Island, 1948.

Initially exploring writing and bookselling, Lynes soon found his aesthetic through the facility of the camera. His first informal portraits were done in the late 1920s, but evolved to official society photography, contributing to significant museum shows, high-profile fashion magazines, and solo exhibitions. Indeed, his glamorous portraits of literary, film, and art world personalities are indicative of the types of personal relationships he had with cogniscenti. His friendship with New York art dealer Julien Levy led to his first exhibition in 1932. Eventually, Lynes' commercial success in portraiture and fashion photography enabled him to open his own New York studio in 1933. For over ten years, Lynes had a love affair with both Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Wescott. He later got together with his studio assistant George Tichenor and, after he died in World War II, Lynes moved in with Jonathan Tichenor, the younger brother of the assistant, with whom he stayed until his death.

Tex Smutney and Buddy Stanley (standing), c.1941

He later became the head of Vogue magazine's West Coast studio in Los Angeles in 1946, where he moved following several years of emotional upheaval in his personal life. There, he photographed celebrities such as Katharine Hepburn, Rosalind Russel, Gloria Swanson, and Orson Welles.

Lynes returned to New York in 1948 and focused his photography practice on his private interests, male nudes, and documenting productions of the New York City Ballet. During this time, Lynes also became acquainted with Dr. Alfred Kinsey, an influential researcher on human sexuality who founded in 1947 the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, now known as the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. A substantial body of Lynes' nude and homoerotic photographic works were ultimately left to the Kinsey Institute after Lynes' death in 1955.

George Platt Lynes is recognized today as one of the masters of 20th century photography, influencing artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Herb Ritts. Though Lynes was commercially successful in New York fashion and portrait photography, his art practice is largely characterized today by his remarkable photographs of nude men, from the 1930s until his death in 1955. Using inventive lighting, posing, and cropping techniques within his carefully staged studio settings, he was able to visually translate both the physical and psychological nuances of his subjects.