While making his name as one of America’s foremost fashion photographers of the 1930s and 40s, George Platt Lynes (1907–1955) spent years working in secret on a series of male nudes that were revealed in the years after his death. The photographs only survived by the fortunes of fate; Lynes, who famously led an extravagant life, became pressed for money and sold more than 600 prints and several hundred original negatives to Dr Alfred Kinsey’s Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. The rest where destroyed by Lynes himself, just prior to his death.
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Although Lynes rarely photographed explicit acts, he took care to create images that, as he told Kinsey in a letter, rendered the word “erotic” inadequate. Kinsey, for his part, did not look at the work as art but as artefact: evidence of sexual behaviour and fantasy in postwar America. Lynes, on the other hand, recognised the work as the most important in his highly successful commercial and fine art career, a career that started by pure serendipity.
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