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Alex Capecelatro

Collector

George Platt Lynes — Self-Portrait with Randolph Jack
George Platt Lynes — Self-Portrait with Randolph Jack
George Platt Lynes — Self-Portrait with Randolph Jack
George Platt Lynes

Self-Portrait with Randolph Jack

1947

George Platt Lynes shares the frame with Randolph Jack, his lover and one of the most enduring muses of his late career. After a long domestic menage with the writer Glenway Wescott and the curator Monroe Wheeler ended, Lynes and Jack settled into a partnership that ran through the final years of his New York practice. Jack appears repeatedly across the male nudes of this period, and the two of them in a single picture is rare in Lynes's output, a quiet self inscription of the photographer beside his beloved rather than the usual solitary studio nude. These pictures of male intimacy carried real risk in mid century America. After major museums declined the work as obscene, Lynes deposited the bulk of his male nudes with Alfred Kinsey at the Institute for Sex Research in Indiana. That archive preserved a body of queer photographic documentation that would otherwise have been lost, and made Lynes a foundational figure for later generations of gay portraitists from Robert Mapplethorpe to Peter Hujar.

Medium
gelatin silver print
Dimensions
Signed
Yes

Notes

A Ménage with George Platt Lynes, Rago Auctions, 2026-05-01. Lot 148. Inscribed to verso 'G.

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About this work

George Platt Lynes, Self-Portrait with Randolph Jack, 1947

George Platt Lynes shares the frame with Randolph Jack, his lover and one of the most enduring muses of his late career. After a long domestic menage with the writer Glenway Wescott and the curator Monroe Wheeler ended, Lynes and Jack settled into a partnership that ran through the final years of his New York practice. Jack appears repeatedly across the male nudes of this period, and the two of them in a single picture is rare in Lynes's output, a quiet self inscription of the photographer beside his beloved rather than the usual solitary studio nude. These pictures of male intimacy carried real risk in mid century America. After major museums declined the work as obscene, Lynes deposited the bulk of his male nudes with Alfred Kinsey at the Institute for Sex Research in Indiana. That archive preserved a body of queer photographic documentation that would otherwise have been lost, and made Lynes a foundational figure for later generations of gay portraitists from Robert Mapplethorpe to Peter Hujar.

Medium
gelatin silver print
Dimensions
24.1 x 18.8 cm
Year
1947
Signed
Hand-signed by the artist
Seen at
Rago Auctions, Lambertville, United States

Related themes

Figure Study, Relationship, Modernist Photography, Documentary, Studio Photography, Fine Art Photography, Composition, Gelatin Silver Print, Homoerotic Art, Classical Form, Male Nudes, Vulnerability, Physicality, Self-Portrait, Intimacy, Portrait Photography, Couple, Tonal Values, Mid-Century, Black and White, Archival Print

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Jonathan Murray, Alex Capecelatro