George Platt Lynes was born in 1907 in East Orange, New Jersey, and raised in an affluent household with a minister father and socially prominent mother. As a teenager, he struggled at boarding school, so in 1925, his parents sent him to Paris for college preparatory studies. There he befriended Gertrude Stein and became immersed in her vibrant circle of avant-garde artists and writers. Upon his return to the US in 1926, Lynes briefly attended Yale University before leaving school to pursue a literary life in New York City.

In 1927, he inherited some photography equipment and began taking portraits of his family, friends, and lovers. Among them were publisher and museum professional Monroe Wheeler and poet and novelist Glenway Wescott, who would remain influential creative and romantic forces in Lynes’s tumultuous and brief life. By 1929, he committed himself to the vocation of photography and began making a living as a celebrity portraitist while also advancing his experiments with male nudes. In the early 1930s Lynes began exhibiting his photographs and rapidly gained success with editorial fashion commissions for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and Town & Country, as well as luxury brands. In 1935, he became the first official photographer for the American Ballet (now the New York City Ballet), and his success continued through the war years.

The wartime death of his lover and studio assistant George Tichenor and a phase of professional disillusionment prompted the artist’s sudden move to Los Angeles in 1947 where he worked on assignment for Vogue. A period of financial instability followed, and he returned to New York in 1948 where, as tastes were changing, commercial opportunities for the artist declined. As a result, he dedicated his creative energy to his male nudes in the early 1950s as his health began to fail. Diagnosed with lung cancer, Lynes passed away in December 1955 at the age of 48. Before his death, he destroyed much of his work, but he also entrusted a large collection of negatives to the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University.

Lynes’s photographs have been collected widely by museums such as Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia; Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Centre Pompidou, Paris, among many others.