My best work has always been spontaneous, one thing suggesting another during a sitting, always at the last minute

George Platt Lynes - Self-portrait, 1952
 
 

Monroe Wheeler’s last companion and executor, Anatole Pohorilenko, claims that what “was instantly evident to both Monroe and Glenway was George’s ability, even in these snapshots, to capture and reveal a certain quality in the subject that was always there but not always apparent.” Enthusiastic about the pictures George had taken, Monroe and Glenway immediately encouraged George in the direction of photography as a possible career.
(p. 181*)

In high-keyed lighting at once theatrical and flattering, Lynes made his subjects look the part they needed to play. He was a confirmed member of that elite group of photographers—among them Cecil Beaton, George Hoyningen-Huene, and Horst P. Horst—who established the primacy of the Condé Nast empire in promoting celebrity and fashion images.
(p. 34*)

Throughout this early period of Kirstein’s efforts to cultivate an indigenous audience for a new “American” ballet, George Platt Lynes was there to document the results—and to train his camera on the faces of many in this circle of gay and bisexual collaborators, some of whom became his own friends, Tchelitchew, Cadmus, and French chief among them. Reciprocally, these visual artists put Lynes in their drawings, paintings, and photographs, so that an informal admiration society provided mutual support, serving as “advertisement for both the sitter and the portraitist. One way an artistic circle constitutes itself as such is through portraits of its members.
(pp. 37-38*)

“I’ve usually done my best work when I’ve worked only for pleasure, when I’ve not been paid, when I’ve had a completely free hand, when I’ve had a model who has excited me in one way or another.”
(p. 635*)

I’ve never been a first-rate fashion photographer, except now and then, by way of fluke or odd inspiration. We all know that. But let’s keep it to ourselves as much, as long, as we can. I’ve a living to make. . . . Too often I’ve had a plan, a background or composition or atmosphere in my head, that has had to be abandoned because last-minute requirements have made it impracticable or inappropriate. Nearly always my fashion jobs are hurry-up, helter-skelter, devil-take-the-hindmost. . . . As for “imagination,” you must know that my best work has always been spontaneous, one thing suggesting another during a sitting, always at the last minute.
(p. 653*)

*    *     *     *     *


From his start as an amateur learning the craft until the end of his life, the male nude in all its variety, and the male nude portrait, imprinted by race, class, and the stamp of individual personality, became central photographic pursuits for George.
(p. 192*)

George was always concerned that his male nudes might be considered pornographic or obscene. He fretted to Kinsey over the categories into which his photographs might be squeezed by the Institute. He suspected that Kinsey’s archival taxonomy might label as “erotic” or “confidential” photographs “which seem to me neither.” He put it to Kinsey directly, “Please let me have your definition, in this connection, to the word ‘erotic.’ ” He had already insisted to Kinsey, “I don’t want [the male nudes] buried in some archive. I do want prints available to anybody who may want them. They are not, as you know ‘pornographic’: and as many as not (or am I wrong about this?) are pure and plain enough to satisfy even the postal authorities.”
(pp. 640-641*)
 
With Kinsey’s interest, Lynes was comforted knowing that an institutional archive would confer on them an aesthetic and scientific legitimacy that no postal inspector, provincial judge, or opportunist politician could ever understand. Lynes thereby secured a legacy that would inspire such later proponents of high-art male eroticism as Robert Mapplethorpe, Herb Ritts, and Bruce Weber when, rediscovered, his male nudes were exhibited in a wholly changed social environment.
(p. 41*)

Neither Morgan [Forster] nor George was assured of an audience besides the one inside their own circles, but Forster’s willingness to let the manuscript [of Maurice] make its way to America reveals that despite his qualms about the legal or social reception to this daringly conceived work, he staked his faith in the future. The same was true of Lynes, who gave to Dr. Kinsey for archival safekeeping a body of work for an imagined posterity.
(p. 647*)

*    *     *     *     *


A few short years later, he was part of a singular ménage-à-trois, enamored of two older talented and handsome Americans, novelist Glenway Wescott and a designer of rare illustrated books, Monroe Wheeler. Unlike closeted gay life as imagined before the changes wrought by the Stonewall Rebellion of 1969, these three men designed a way of life that appears as inventively bohemian as the roundelay of London’s Bloomsbury Group.
(p. 41*)

The Wheelers, Monroe’s parents in Evanston, received the young newlyweds next. There, Monroe’s relationship with Glenway had likewise been absorbed as simple fact. That the established homosexual pair should bring Barbara and Lloyd to the Wheeler family as well—a visit encouraged by geographical proximity, but also by a strong sense of family feeling—suggests how much familial ties could quietly defy social conventions so long as discretion was observed, and such matters kept within the family. The Askew salon was not the only venue where “don’t ask, don’t tell” reigned as a rule against social discomfort and disruption.
(p. 373-374*)

George began seeing a psychiatrist again, Dr. Ernst Jolowicz, whose sessions were inscribed in his datebook twice a week. George described them to Katherine Anne as “a sorting out, making the accumulated muddle make some sense, putting the past in its place,” yet he despaired “of ever learning . . . what effect or impression I make upon no matter whom at any given moment. And I can’t help feeling that, if that could be learned, it would save me and all the others a hell of a lot of trouble.”
(p. 622*)

*according to my reader
 
Allen Ellenzweig - George Platt Lynes: The Daring Eye (Oxford University Press, 2022)

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