Throughout his life, he continued to document more private moments among his friends, with many of whom he had relationships, according to Leddick.
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Lynes "came back to New York and was pretty much a rudderless 20-something, and a friend of a friend gave him a studio's worth of photo equipment, and he decided to try his hand at it."Įarly on, Lynes photographed those in his inner circle before obtaining work in the fashion and ballet industries. "All these artists were in this total Petri dish of everything - writing, painting, photography - in Paris in the 1920s," Lawrence said. Lynes grew up in New Jersey and Massachusetts with a face that his male classmates found attractive, even if they did bully him, according to writer David Leddick in "Intimate Companions: A Triography of George Platt Lynes, Paul Cadmus, Lincoln Kirstein, and Their Circle." After graduating high school, he traveled to Paris and joined up with a salon of famous expatriates, including writer Gertrude Stein, her partner Alice B.
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"What is a man going to do with a picture of a male nude? He's not going to hang it on his wall as art because then people presume that he's gay, and then that could affect his work, that could affect his family life," Lawrence said. Robin Lawrence, Newfields' manager of curatorial affairs, said a taboo surrounded images of naked men when Lynes worked in an era of hyper-masculinity the early 20th century. They reveal the most intimate areas of the male body in unexpected poses that might still surprise 21st-century eyes. The nudes are vulnerable and frank, as Ellenzweig described them. But in the decades since his death, many critics have found his most interesting work to be his celebrity portraits and nudes. He posed New York City Ballet dancers in inventive ways that cemented the legends surrounding ballerinas like Maria Tallchief and Tanaquil LeClercq. Lynes paid his bills by shooting commercial fashion layouts in Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. Visitors can choose whether they want to see the frontal pictures, said Anne Young, manager of rights and reproductions at Newfields. The museum and Indiana University's Kinsey Institute, which researches human sexuality, are presenting the work that comprises "Sensual/Sexual/Social: The Photography of George Platt Lynes."Īrt installations in office cubicles: Arcade, music venue, bar, art space combo opens southeast of Fountain Squareįamous fiddle has Indiana connections: This 'jealous mistress' Stradivarius violin was owned by an Indy 500 driver.īecause the show contains mature images, "Sexual/Sensual/Social's" nude gallery is divided into two paths. Now, an exhibit of Lynes' work - including his portraits, ballet images and nudes - will open Sunday at the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. The images remained guarded until the late 1970s, when they began to circulate in books and exhibits, said Allen Ellenzweig, a Lynes scholar and adjunct professor of writing at Rutgers University. Before his death in 1955, the photographer sold his cherished nudes to his sexologist friend Alfred Kinsey. He didn't want them to be his legacy.īut Lynes left mostly untouched the male nudes he kept secret from the public, along with his portraits and pictures of ballet dancers, which he considered his best work. Lynes was handsome, he ran with the most cutting-edge gay and bisexual artists in the 1930s and '40s, and he died at age 48. As the photographer was suffering from lung cancer, he destroyed many of the commercial fashion pictures that had brought him fame. And he paved the path for Robert Mapplethorpe to stir lawmakers into a frenzy over photos of sexually explicit acts in a 1989 Washington, D.C., exhibit that used taxpayer dollars. His portraits of celebrities and nude male pictures laid the groundwork for Annie Leibovitz to cast the light just so as John Lennon curled around Yoko Ono. George Platt Lynes is the name of a man you likely don't know who influenced the photographers you do.
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Editor's note: Content contains mature themes.