WATCH: A photographer’s secret collection of homoerotic art offers a glimpse into the hidden past
Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Town & Country, and thanks to a cover shoot with artist Lisa Fonssagrives, he is said to have lensed the world’s first-ever supermodel.But, unknown to most of the world, Lynes was also responsible for an entirely separate body of work, photographs which, if made public, could get him thrown and jail—or worse.Subscribe to our newsletter for your front-row seat to all things entertainment with a sprinkle of everything else queer.“It was hot and dangerous stuff,” one expert says in Hidden Master: The Legacy Of George Platt Lynes, a new documentary from acclaimed art director Sam Shahid which lifts the curtain on the photographer’s secret collection, much of which has remained behind closed doors until very recently.While his commercial career was flourishing in the ’30s and ’40s, Lynes also pursued his passion for nude portraiture and often outright homoerotic art—photographs both radically intimate and explicit, and wildly ahead of their time.In stark black-and-white, his private collection offered a survey of the male form, capturing devastatingly handsome men at their most vulnerable and powerful.
Brimming with “emotion and authentic sexual energy,” these photographs are unmistakably a product of the queer male gaze.After Lynes died of lung cancer in 1955—at the young age of 48—it was reported that he had destroyed these secret archives, possibly out fear that their discovery could ruin the careers and lives of his subjects.
However, art historians only more recently became aware that he actually donated much of his work to his friend Dr. Alfred Kinsey, whose Kinsey Institute was doing groundbreaking research on homosexuality and gender.The out-gay photographer of the 1930s loved photographing naked men in very homoerotic poses.The doc Hidden Master examines the scope and influence of this collection for the first time, cracking open the vault, so to speak.
