On January 19, 2024, the Koerner Center opened the exhibition “George Platt Lynes at Work: The Gary Haller Collection,” which will be on view at the Center through June 30. The exhibition features sixty black-and-white images from Koerner director Gary Haller’s personal collection by George Platt Lynes, a photographer who produced works from the late 1920s through 1955. A catalogue accompanying the exhibition includes essays by George Platt Lynes’s biographer Allen Ellenzweig and by photographer and editor of MATTE Magazine Matthew Leifheit, as well as commentary by Yale Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts Timothy Young.
The photographs in the exhibition span the entire length of Lynes’s career and highlight “the major genres of his [work]: portraiture, the classical dance, mythological subjects, women’s fashion, and the human figure, especially the male nude.” In his essay, Leifheit, considering the former photographer his “spectral mentor as a graduate student at the Yale School of Art,” writes:
Although the camera is often accused of being a cold, unfeeling eye, in the work of Lynes it is clear that the lens can be imbued with emotion, especially with desire. If Lynes didn’t make a separation in his work between what was erotic and what was not, there are certain pictures where he is clearly more invested in the subject in one way or another, and it’s absolutely apparent in the photograph. This is not limited by any means to the male nudes; it is true of some portraits, some fashion pictures, many dance images, and especially his scrapbook pages and collages. What I learned from Lynes is that some pictures are forged hotter than others. I learned that if you look at something the right way, it can burn forever.
The exhibition is on view at 149 Elm Street, second floor. Visit by invitation or appointment by calling 203-432-8227.