Fragmentary Aesthetics: The Scrapbooks of Photographer George Platt Lynes

The personal scrapbooks of American photographer George Platt Lynes contain a wide range of popular and cultural imagery. Examples include reproductions of 19th-century portraits of the Countess de Castiglione and Charles Baudelaire, 20th-century fashion images by Steichen, Beaton, and Horst for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, and clippings from Life magazine. These materials are affixed alongside postcards and printed ephemera featuring nude African Folies Bergères dancers, “Orientalized” female models, and Indigenous peoples from across the globe.

In the 1930s and 1940s Lynes was a successful commercial photographer but today he is largely remembered for his homoerotic male nudes. In light of this, these curious scrapbooks could be characterized as intimate objects of queer consumption. But if we cast aside this biographically-inflected interpretation an alternative reading of the scrapbooks emerges. The images within coalesce to chart a history of European and American fashion photography. However, their physical adjacency to ethnographic imagery challenge our received notions about this history and the genre more broadly. By carefully considering the original contexts, detachment, and reassembly of these image fragments this paper seeks to reframe the discreet genres of fashion photography and ethnographic documentation as inherently interconnected. It will closely examine an exemplary set of images to ask if the scrapbook is itself a “contact zone” where pictures meet and become necessarily entangled? To this end, questions of visual enunciation and aesthetic appropriation become central to this paper leading to an interrogation of Lynes’s relationship to this material and it to his photographic oeuvre.