LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth |
PAST Out |
by Rawley Grau |
Who Was George Platt Lynes?
In the 1930s, the photographs of George Platt Lynes could be found in all the major fashion magazines, and celebrities were eager to sit before his camera. But today the photographer is most remembered for pictures that he never publishedhis male nude photography. These elegant yet unabashedly homoerotic images were revolutionary, and their influence on recent photographers such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Greg Gorman is profound. Born in 1907, Lynes grew up in New Jersey, where his father was an Episcopalian minister. Attending boarding school in Massachu-setts, he developed a keen interest in contemporary literature and desire to be part of the avant-garde. So after graduating in 1925, he went to Paris to meet Gertrude Stein. Charmed by the teenager's enthusiasm and naivet, Stein took an interest in Lynes and was soon hobnobbing with the French literati. But when he returned to the United States eight months later, he was still unsure of his career. In 1927, he met the young novelist Glenway Wescott and his lover, Monroe Wheeler. Lynes began a passionate affair with Wheeler, to which Wescott assented; this menage a trois seems to have worked well for all three men. The next few years saw Lynes traveling back and forth to France, where Wescott and Wheeler lived among the Bohemian expatriate community. Lynes thought he might like to be a writer, but in 1929, a wealthy dilettante friend of Wescott and Wheeler's offered Lynes her photographic equipment (she was going to try something else) and his career was settled. The young man had already shown flair in the pictures he took of such literary friends as Stein and Jean Cocteau. His talents developed quickly, and by 1932, his photographsoften displaying surrealist overtoneswere being exhibited in major New York shows. Wescott and Wheeler moved back to New York in the early '30s, and the three men set up house together. Lynes embarked on a career in fashion photography and was soon hired as the official photographer for the American Ballet Company (later the New York City Ballet), which his friend Lincoln Kirstein had recently formed with choreographer George Balanchine. During this period, the most stable in his life, Lynes lived comfortably amid swank societythe "beautiful people." Indeed, the young photographer, himself strikingly handsome, was surrounded by beautiful men, many of them dancers, and he usually didn't have trouble persuading them to take off their clothes for his camera. Lynes' male nudes differ notably from other male nude photography of the day, which tended to imitate classical sculpture and painting. Nor does his work resemble the "physique" pictures that proliferated in the '50s, where nearly naked men exude an air of athletic innocence. In contrast, Lynes used dramatic lighting, simple props, and minimalist settings to reveal the male body as fleshly, sensual, and desired. Though he usually arranged his models in stylized poseshe created a whole series on mythological themes, for examplehis photographs often express a profound yearning for erotic intimacy. Many are discreet, with no genitalia on view, but others clearly focus on the models' genitals, while yet others present male couples in tender embrace. One of the handsome men who modeled for Lynes in 1940 was his 20-year-old studio assistant, George Tichenor. Lynes became infatuated with Tichenor, but it was apparently an unrequited love. When Tichenor was killed two years later during World War II, Lynes was devastated. Although he soon became involved with Tichenor's younger brother, Jonathan, this death marked the beginning of an emotional and professional decline for Lynes. Lynes moved out of the apartment he shared with Wescott and Wheeler in order to live with Jonathan. Lynes had always been prone to extravagant spending, but now it increased to dangerous levels. At the same time, he grew less interested in the photography that paid his bills and spent more and more time on his male nudes (he did, however, sell a few of these images under a pseudonym to a Swiss gay magazine). The affair with Jonathan Tichenor soon unraveled, and Lynes became increasingly promiscuous. In 1946, Lynes became chief photographer at Vogue and moved to Los Angeles to photograph film stars. The stint lasted two years, during which time he sank ever more deeply into debt. After his return to New York, his financial problems only worsened. Finally, in 1951, because he had continually neglected to pay taxes, the government padlocked his studio and auctioned off his equipment, forcing Lynes to declare bankruptcy. Lynes relied heavily on family and friends for financial assistance, though some money came in from Dr. Alfred Kinsey, the sex researcher, whom Lynes met in 1949. Kinsey purchased over 600 prints of Lynes' male nude photographs, as well as several hundred original negatives, as examples of homosexual eroticism for his institute's collection. In 1955, Lynes was diagnosed with lung cancer. Worried about his reputation (this, after all, was the McCarthy Era), he destroyed a large number of his homoerotic prints and negatives before he died in December of that year. It would be another quarter-century before Lynes' most passionate and innovative workpreserved at the Kinsey Institute and in private collectionscould finally be shared with the public. Suggested reading: Cooper, Emmanuel, 1995. Fully Exposed: The Male Nude in Photography. New York: Routledge. Crump, James, ed., 1993. George Platt Lynes: Photographs from the Kinsey Institute. Introduction by Bruce Weber. Boston: Bullfinch Press. Leddick, David, 2000. Intimate Companions: A Triography of George Platt Lynes, Paul Cadmus, Lincoln Kirstein, and Their Circle. New York: St. Martin's Press. Rawley Grau has won four Vice Versa Awards for his writing on gay and lesbian culture. He can be reached at GayNestor@aol.com. |
LETTERS From CAMP Rehoboth, Vol. 11, No. 11, August 10, 2001. |