Latest news with #GeorgePlattLynes
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes review – eye-opening snapshot of New York's queer scene
George Platt Lynes was an American photographer who lived in Paris in the 1920s and then mostly in New York City for the rest of his life; he died in 1955. A gay man who was very out by the standards of the times, he was right in the middle of the one of the most flamboyant bohemian queer scenes of the period. And, man, did he have fun, shagging up a storm and taking nude pictures of beautiful men and women (but mostly men) when he wasn't earning work shooting fashion spreads for Vogue magazine. This documentary, directed by Sam Shahid, introduces his life and work in a deeply respectful, straightforward way, splicing in hundreds of examples of his mostly black-and-white pictures with curators, admirers and some surviving friends and acquaintances. Notable interviewees include portrait artist Don Bachardy, and the painter Bernard Perlin, seen in archive footage given he died in 2014, who was a very close friend of Platt Lynes and the executor of his artistic estate. Like so many other documentaries about dead artists that require cooperation from the deceased's estate, this sometimes gets a little hyperbolic about its subject's talent. Which is not to say that Lynes' work isn't worth exploring and celebrating, not only for its aesthetic merits but also for the way it captures a specific time and place. His commercial work was classical and elegant, tinged with a surrealism he learned first hand from Man Ray himself. His nudes and frankly erotic material are gorgeously sensual with a chilly, sculptural quality whose influence can be traced in later photographers of male nudes like Robert Mapplethorpe. Meanwhile, the snapshot the film offers of New York's queer scene in the 1940s and 50s – a shimmering fever dream of orgiastic (literally) cocktail parties, fuelled by passion and pomp – is an eye-opening delight. Lynes himself was in a long-running menage a trois with curator Monroe Wheeler and writer Glenway Wescott well before the word polyamorous was even coined, let alone 'throuple'. He was also very close to such figures as Gertrude Stein, who scolded him like a granny for dropping out of university, and Christopher Isherwood among others. His encounter with sexologist Alfred Kinsey (which became a friendship) resulted in the Kinsey Institute holding a significant chunk of Lynes' work, including a box marked 'private' that the curators teasingly insist they've never looked in out of respect for Lynes. The latter emerges as an irrepressibly charming figure, although perhaps not without a sinister, manipulative side that the film never really delves into. Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes is in UK cinemas from 11 July.
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes review – eye-opening snapshot of New York's queer scene
George Platt Lynes was an American photographer who lived in Paris in the 1920s and then mostly in New York City for the rest of his life; he died in 1955. A gay man who was very out by the standards of the times, he was right in the middle of the one of the most flamboyant bohemian queer scenes of the period. And, man, did he have fun, shagging up a storm and taking nude pictures of beautiful men and women (but mostly men) when he wasn't earning work shooting fashion spreads for Vogue magazine. This documentary, directed by Sam Shahid, introduces his life and work in a deeply respectful, straightforward way, splicing in hundreds of examples of his mostly black-and-white pictures with curators, admirers and some surviving friends and acquaintances. Notable interviewees include portrait artist Don Bachardy, and the painter Bernard Perlin, seen in archive footage given he died in 2014, who was a very close friend of Platt Lynes and the executor of his artistic estate. Like so many other documentaries about dead artists that require cooperation from the deceased's estate, this sometimes gets a little hyperbolic about its subject's talent. Which is not to say that Lynes' work isn't worth exploring and celebrating, not only for its aesthetic merits but also for the way it captures a specific time and place. His commercial work was classical and elegant, tinged with a surrealism he learned first hand from Man Ray himself. His nudes and frankly erotic material are gorgeously sensual with a chilly, sculptural quality whose influence can be traced in later photographers of male nudes like Robert Mapplethorpe. Meanwhile, the snapshot the film offers of New York's queer scene in the 1940s and 50s – a shimmering fever dream of orgiastic (literally) cocktail parties, fuelled by passion and pomp – is an eye-opening delight. Lynes himself was in a long-running menage a trois with curator Monroe Wheeler and writer Glenway Wescott well before the word polyamorous was even coined, let alone 'throuple'. He was also very close to such figures as Gertrude Stein, who scolded him like a granny for dropping out of university, and Christopher Isherwood among others. His encounter with sexologist Alfred Kinsey (which became a friendship) resulted in the Kinsey Institute holding a significant chunk of Lynes' work, including a box marked 'private' that the curators teasingly insist they've never looked in out of respect for Lynes. The latter emerges as an irrepressibly charming figure, although perhaps not without a sinister, manipulative side that the film never really delves into. Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes is in UK cinemas from 11 July.
Vogue
30-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Vogue
The 1940s Vogue Photographer Who Turned His Lens to the Male Muses of Fire Island
If you read Vogue in the 1940s, one name more than any other appeared beneath its photographs: George Platt Lynes. In nearly every issue, he captured portraits of models, like Lisa Fonssagrives (later the wife of Irving Penn), socialites like Babe Paley, or actors like Burt Lancaster and Joan Crawford wearing the latest fashions; in 1947, the magazine even asked him to lead their West Coast studio. His work was polished, prim, and proper at a time where society prioritized all things polished, prim, and proper. But Lynes had another, more secretive aesthetic that was quite the opposite. George Platt Lynes's photograph of author Wilbur Pippin, Fire Island, c.1948–1952. Private collection, courtesy of In the village of Saltaire on Fire Island—now a famous gay enclave, but back then, an emerging one—he took risqué, fashion-forward pictures of men in the nude or close to it. The imagery was relaxed, dynamic, and evocative—although never pornographic: 'They're more about the body as form,' says James Crump, film director, art historian, and author of George Platt Lynes: Photographs from the Kinsey Institute. Debutantes: Ann Burton, Nancy Young, and Marilyn Mueller. Photographed by George Platt Lynes, Vogue, April 1948 Babe Paley, shot by George Platt Lynes for Vogue. Photographed by George Platt Lynes, Vogue, October 1945 At Vogue, Lynes often turned his lens on wealthy women. But on Fire Island, Lynes focused on subjects like ballet dancers or male models—or just attractive men that he heard of through word of mouth. 'I always believed that Lynes photographed a lot of men who knew how to fix a car, but the difference was that he made them look like they went to Yale,' Bruce Weber once said of the photographer. For Vogue, he used a static, bulky camera in his studio. On Fire Island, however, he often embraced a point-and-shoot, as well as natural light. 'The photographs are much more relaxed, much more playful, much more eroticized. Not the formal, elegant type of images he's so known for in fashion,' Crump adds. He found an artistic community with Paul Cadmus, Jared and Margaret French—a photographic collection known as PaJaMa—and together, they began quietly subverting the notion that gay identity was worth capturing in all its beauty, rather something that needed to hidden. (PaJaMa also often treated Lynes like a model—we've included some of their portraits of him in this article.)
