The Queer Art History in George Platt Lynes’s Scrapbooks

In 1955, only months prior to his death from lung cancer at age 48, queer American photographer George Platt Lynes destroyed a major portion of his archive, targeting his commercial negatives, prints of fashion images and society portraits. Curating his own legacy, Lynes spared certain portraits of his preferred models, his large corpus of erotic male nudes, and a series of scrapbooks or albums, the contents of which largely comprises photojournalistic images, society portraits, fashion photographs, and reproductions of artworks excised from mass-media periodicals. Taken together, these disparate images document Lynes’s attempt to collect, recollect, and reconstruct a past that resists consolidation. From “Rail Shooting on the Delaware” (1876) by Thomas Eakins to Marcel Duchamp’s 1921 assisted readymade “Why Not Sneeze Rose Selavy?” multiple, unstable, and seemingly incommensurate narratives surface through the peculiar image relationships in these volumes to expose the instabilities of art history’s categorical boundaries and Lynes’ own queer relationship to them. Likely assembled for private consumption among Lynes’ intimates, this eccentric collection of cut, cropped, and glued fragments reconfigures the period’s accepted narratives of modernism and anti-modernism into a kind of queer cosmology of American art. Roland Barthes has characterized the scrapbook as “a varied collection of reflections and items (press cuttings for instance) whose mere notation leads to certain meaning” (“La Bruyère,” 1963) and, in this paper, I suggest that these visual notations, or rather appropriations, reveal this collection to be a perpetual staging area for the signification and re-signification that animates Lynes’s practice.