Dir: Sam Shahid |Doc. 2023 96′

Reviewed by Peter Herbert

George Platt Lynes (1907- 1955) and his obscurity is addressed in this stylish documentary by director Sam Shahid and dedicated colleagues. Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes could be described as a form of “detective documentary” as it involves the patience of a sleuth painstakingly uncovering obstacles linked to the neglect of a key figure in the development of male nude photography.

The reasons for the neglect relate to complex social and sexual landscapes that the photographer lived in from the 1920s onwards. Born in America, he spent formative years as a young man in Paris as the favoured portrait photographer of writer Gertude Stein which allowed movement into a circle of creative friends, including the groundbreaking surrealist, Jean Cocteau.

Avant Garde ideas of content and composition were reflected in Platt Lynes strikingly lit, static tableaux portrait photography. Commissions for fashion photography followed, reflecting surrealism influences, although it was his love of masculine beauty that drove another aspect of his inner creative drive. Openly, fearlessly gay and involved in a threesome relationship with the couple Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Westcott, his photography was at its most powerful where it involved the beauty of the naked male body including explicit sexual imagery.

The best of these images is sensuous, intimate and warm using fashion sets containing fabric and panes of glass to provide layers of light and shade.
The problem for Platt Lynes would be in how male nudity and the creative arts were perceived by society with a wide range of laws that prohibited LGBT sexuality.

His brief unhappy tenure on Hollywood during the late 40s has been described as “a gay community turned in on itself with internalised homophobia” and his male nude photography remained unseen. The post WW2 and McCarthy era added more repression with increased lavender marriages and although the naked female body was more acceptable, images of the penis remained problematic. This would not change until the introduction more relaxed censorship from the late 1960’s onwards.

It is here that Hidden Master persuasively argues that Platt Lynes was a radical pioneer. Contemporaries Cecil Beaton, Angus McBean, Horst P Horst and George Heyningen Huene wanted to be remembered less for male nudes, and more for portrait and fashion photography. Platt Lynes saw his legacy differently and destroyed much of his portrait/fashion photography to focus on a body of male nude images. He was aided here by valuable support from the sexologist Alfred Kinsey, University archives and art related institutes.

Apart from early support from a nephew, the Platt Lynes Estate remained less than supportive and his legacy would remain diminished without the focus of a film like Hidden Master which has been stylishly assembled by mixing talking heads with beautiful montages of images. They combine to build the case by Shahid for Platt Lynes as a pathway to later gay photographers including Herb Ritts, Bruce Webber, Pierre et Giles, and in the UK Mike Arlen who also crossed over from the worlds of portrait and fashion into male nude photography.

There is an interesting link with mixed race male photography in Platt Lynes’ work surfacing in the later images of Robert Mapplethorpe. Hidden Master also contains an underlying feeling that these freedoms are still vulnerable and fragile in the art world involving male nude photopraphy.

As a passion project and labour of love, this is one of the most striking and valuable of recent documentaries and concludes with several surprises worthy of the film’s detective work. One is the discovery of the only surviving live footage of the photographer and the other, a private secret that adds to the mystery that there is still more to unravel with understanding and appreciating the life of a genuine Hidden Masters enjoying the light of day in a new era. PBH / f/2 

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