Photographer George Platt Lynes, born in 1907, was self-taught but shot portraits of Gertrude Stein (she called him “Baby”), Jean Cocteau, Tennessee Williams and countless Hollywood heartthrobs. He was a well-regarded fashion photographer and worked for the likes of Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Henri Bendel. He was also the primary photographer for the New York City Ballet, and it’s said that Balanchine considered Lynes a leading figure in the image-making process and visual iconography of the company. Perhaps more importantly, though less known, he was also the first photographer in America to specialize in the male nude.
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So why has Lynes largely been regarded as a secondary figure in the history of photography? Hidden Master, a documentary directed by Sam Shahid (now available on Apple TV ), tries to answer this question through extensive interviews with photographers, gallerists, artists, curators and representatives of the Kinsey Institute and makes a strong case for Lynes’s artistic merits both as a Modernist photographer and as a representative of the Queer community.
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Rebecca Fasman, a curator at the Kinsey Institute and manager of their traveling exhibitions division, told Observer that she was only “vaguely........