Young of Newfields. What an absolute privilege it is to be able to publish these magnificent photographs by George Platt Lynes from the Kinsey Institute. Intertwined with this stream of photographs of masculine men are photographs of youthful male bodies ephebes such as appear in the works of Fredrick Holland Day and Baron von Gloeden, later to be followed by the photographs of Horst P.
Horst and Herbert List. In these photographs he tried to reveal a transcendence of spirit through an aesthetic vision of androgynous physical perfection. He revelled in the sensuous hedonistic beauty of what he saw as the perfection of the youthful male body. Using heavily set Sicilian peasant youths with rough hands and feet von Gloeden turned these bodies into heroic images of Grecian legend, usually photographing his nude figures in their entirety.
In the early male nude photographs of GPL the form of the male is usually that of the ephebe, while in the latter stages of his life the male figure is, as a general rule, heavier set, the lighting more brooding, the sexuality more open. This can be seen in the photographs in this posting, the chaste photograph from the s above relying on light and form, whereas in the photographs from the s the sexual frisson is much in evidence — the opened fly on the trousers of the sailor , below and the pubic hair and jocks in the male in profile , the year GPL died of cancer.
After a period of residence in Hollywood he returned to New York nearly penniless. His style of photographing the male nude underwent a revision. While the photographs of his European colleagues still relied on the sun drenched bodies of young adolescent males evoking memories of classical beauty and the mythology of Ancient Greece the later nudes of Platt Lynes feature a mixture of youthful ephebes and heavier set bodies which appear to be more sexually knowing.
The compositional style of dramatically lit photographs of muscular torsos of older men shot in close up … were possibly influenced by a number of things — his time in Hollywood with its images of handsome, swash-buckling movie stars with broad chests and magnificent physiques; the images of bodybuilders by physique photographers that George Platt Lynes visited; the fact that his lover George Tichenor had been killed during WWII; and the knowledge that he was penniless and had cancer.
