George Platt Lynes taught himself photography, and by the 1930s he had became one of New York’s most successful portrait and fashion photographers. His images of celebrities were published in magazines like Town and Country and Harper’s Bazaar, while his more private work focused on surreal imagery and male nudes. In 1945 Lynes moved to Hollywood to head the Vogue studio there and made portraits such as this one of the dapper movie star Burt Lancaster. This print was gifted to the museum by Lincoln Kirstein, an arts patron and cofounder of the New York City Ballet as well as a longtime friend of both Lynes and Hugh Edwards. Kirstein wrote the brochure text for Lynes’s 1960 exhibition at the museum, one of the first that Edwards organized.
