If you read Vogue in the 1940s, one name more than any other appeared beneath its photographs: George Platt Lynes. In nearly every issue, he captured portraits of models, like Lisa Fonssagrives (later the wife of Irving Penn), socialites like Babe Paley, or actors like Burt Lancaster and Joan Crawford wearing the latest fashions; in 1947, the magazine even asked him to lead their West Coast studio. His work was polished, prim, and proper at a time where society prioritized all things polished, prim, and proper.<\/p>\n
But Lynes had another, more secretive aesthetic that was quite the opposite.<\/p>\n
George Platt Lynes\u2019s photograph of author Wilbur Pippin, Fire Island, c.1948\u20131952. Private collection, courtesy of A.THERIEN<\/p>\n
In the village of Saltaire on Fire Island\u2014now a famous gay enclave, but back then, an emerging one\u2014he took risqu\u00e9, fashion-forward pictures of men in the nude or close to it. The imagery was relaxed, dynamic, and evocative\u2014although never pornographic: \u201cThey\u2019re more about the body as form,\u201d says James Crump, film director, art historian, and author of George Platt Lynes: Photographs from the Kinsey Institute.<\/p>\n
Debutantes: Ann Burton, Nancy Young, and Marilyn Mueller.<\/p>\n
Photographed by George Platt Lynes, Vogue, April 1948<\/p>\n
Babe Paley, shot by George Platt Lynes for Vogue.<\/p>\n
Photographed by George Platt Lynes, Vogue, October 1945<\/p>\n
At Vogue, Lynes often turned his lens on wealthy women. But on Fire Island, Lynes focused on subjects like ballet dancers or male models\u2014or just attractive men that he heard of through word of mouth. \u201cI always believed that Lynes photographed a lot of men who knew how to fix a car, but the difference was that he made them look like they went to Yale,\u201d Bruce Weber once said of the photographer. For Vogue, he used a static, bulky camera in his studio. On Fire Island, however, he often embraced a point-and-shoot, as well as natural light. \u201cThe photographs are much more relaxed, much more playful, much more eroticized. Not the formal, elegant type of images he’s so known for in fashion,\u201d Crump adds. He found an artistic community with Paul Cadmus, Jared and Margaret French\u2014a photographic collection known as PaJaMa\u2014and together, they began quietly subverting the notion that gay identity was worth capturing in all its beauty, rather something that needed to hidden. (PaJaMa also often treated Lynes like a model\u2014we\u2019ve included some of their portraits of him in this article.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you read Vogue in the 1940s, one name more than any other appeared beneath its photographs: George…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":28183,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[648,1032,1033,171,9991,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-28182","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-design","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-pride-2025","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114774548528775663","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28182","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28182\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}