Self-Portrait, ca. 1945
Photograph by George Platt Lynes
Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York
Gloria Swanson, ca. 1939
(One of the most prominent stars of silent films)
Photograph by George Platt Lynes
Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York
Marsden Hartley, 1943
(American Modernist painter, poet, and essayist)
Photograph by George Platt Lynes
Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York
Bill Miller, 1944
Photograph by George Platt Lynes Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York
Jack B. Woody | George Platt Lynes Collection at Steven Kasher Gallery
Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York
JACK B. WOODY, editor and publisher of Twelvetrees Press and Twin Palms Publishers, has produced some of the finest photography and art books for over thirty years. Woody’s first published photography book, George Platt Lynes: Photographs 1931-1955 (Twelvetrees Press, 1981), was immediately recognized as a classic monograph. Platt Lynes had been a highly successful fashion and portrait photographer in the 1930s and 1940s, rediscovered by Woody in the late 1970's. His George Platt Lynes Collection can now be viewed at the Steven Kasher Gallery through April 7.
From An Interview with Jack Woody: "While working as Director of Photography for the Nicholas Wilder Gallery in L.A. in the late '70's, Duane Michals told me, “There’s someone really out of fashion, a photographer named George Platt Lynes, you might be interested in.” About six months later someone called the gallery and said, “There’s a man in Berkley that wants to sell an album of approximately fifty photographs. Most of them are male nudes.” I went to San Francisco to meet Samuel Steward. George Platt Lyons’s had given him all of these photographs in the ‘50’s. There were fifty photographs. I had gone with a dealer from San Francisco, so I put up half the money and he put up the other half and we bought the album. That became the basis for my first photography book."
"I decided I wanted to do the George Platt Lynes book. I had the collection of fifty images, but I wanted about a hundred for the book. I spent two years tracking down all the living models and accumulating their photographs for this book – I borrowed some and some I bought.. Back then they weren’t worth anything. No one even knew who this George Platt Lynes was. I applied to the National Endowment for the Arts for a grant for the book and I got $12,500. from one of the non-profit arts organizations in LA."
"I sold the books by hand to the Strand and took them to Rizzoli on 57th Street in New York; they bought like fifty of them and put them in the window on Fifth Avenue. I went home and got a call from Andy Grundberg of the New York Times. He said, “I saw your George Platt Lynes book at Rizzoli. Could you send me a review copy?” I had no idea what a review copy was, all I knew is it was free. I said, “What is it for?” He said, “I’d like to write a review”. He gave me The New York Times Fed Ex number, so I sent it to him. He wrote this amazing review, and it just exploded from there."–Jack B. Woody (read more here)
AVEDON | LEITER
Untitled, Liberia, 2005
(Troops at) Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan, 2008
Philip-Lorca diCorcia
Alex Soth: Dog Days Bogota
Susan Forristal | Martin Luther King
Collector John A. Bennette
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