George Platt Lynes is more famous for his male erotica photographs than his
ballet photographs. But I found a copy of his book Ballet over the summer at
the NYU Library, and nobody has stopped me from renewing it.
This book is so rare that I hope Twelvetrees Press won't mind that I direct you to an excerpt from its introduction:
Ballet is the subject of these photographs, yet it is often only incidental to their structure and purpose. George Lynes studied in Paris with Man Ray and admired Jean Cocteau and Gertrude Stein. It was under these influences that he opened his photography studio in New York City during 1932; surrealism, neo-romanticism and other European visual movements remained with him.
When
Lincoln Kirstein and George Balanchine invited George Lynes to
photograph their ballets, they understood he would bring something else
to their vision: a third eye. The shadows of these images are filled
with Lynes' mentors: Cocteau, Joseph Cornell and Pavel Tchelitchew
among them; but the light, Lynes has made his own. These photographs
are airless and brittle, they float before us bearing the magnificence
of their maker's obsession and their subject's otherworldliness. They
are selected herein for their visual interest. No history is implied,
or document recorded, other than the tracing of one man's passions.
Jack Woody, 1985
I also can't find any images from the book online - the image I've subbed is a Paul Cadmus photograph of Lynes and Monroe Wheeler. and
To add my one nightcap thought: there is a photograph toward the front of this book of Sono Osato, taken in 1937. Osato wears a full-length, light-refracting black dress, princess and fitted to the hip with a full train, and it is so startlingly contemporary that I saw some semblance of it yesterday in the black-longsequinned fringe dresses in the window at Prada.
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