George Platt Lynes

George Platt Lynes (1907–1955) was an American photographer whose elegant fashion imagery and pioneering studies of the male nude reshaped mid‑20th‑century photography. Born in East Orange, New Jersey, he studied at Princeton before moving to New York, where he immersed himself in the city’s avant‑garde circles. In the 1930s Lynes worked as a fashion photographer for Vogue, Town & Country, and Vanity Fair, infusing his editorials with a refined sense of composition, dramatic lighting, and a subtle emotional depth.

Lynes maintained close friendships with leading artists of his day—George Balanchine, John Cage, and Cecil Beaton among them—and his portraiture of dancers and writers captured both their strength and vulnerability. In the 1940s he turned his lens to personal projects, creating a groundbreaking body of male nude studies that blended classical form with modernist sensibility, anticipating later developments in fine‑art photography.

A committed collector of surrealist art, Lynes’s studio in midtown Manhattan became a gathering place for artists and intellectuals. Although he passed away in 1955 at the age of forty‑seven, his work has been the subject of major retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art and the J. Paul Getty Museum. George Platt Lynes’s images—at once poised and provocative—continue to influence photographers drawn to the intersection of glamour, artistry, and the human form.