Photographer George Platt Lynes was born in East Orange, New Jersey in 1907. He attended the Berkshire School in Massachusetts, where Lincoln Kirstein was a classmate. Lynes set up his studio in New York City in 1932 and began taking photos for...
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Photographer George Platt Lynes was born in East Orange, New Jersey in 1907. He attended the Berkshire School in Massachusetts, where Lincoln Kirstein was a classmate. Lynes set up his studio in New York City in 1932 and began taking photos for fashion magazines. In 1935, he was commissioned to photograph the dances and dancers of the American Ballet (later New York City Ballet), which he did through the early 1950s. Lynes also took many nude photos, mostly male. Lynes died in New York City in 1955 of lung cancer, at the age of 48. The collection includes approximately 650 black and white photographs of ballets, dancers and choreographers from the earliest days of what would later become the New York City Ballet. Among the 49 dances in the collection are The cage (Robbins), ca. 1951, The duel (Dollar), ca. 1951, Fancy free (Robbins), ca. 1944, Firebird (Balanchine), 1949, La gloire (Tudor), ca. 1952, Les illuminations (Ashton), ca. 1950, Jones Beach (Balanchine), 1950, Orpheus (Balanchine), 1948, Swan lake (Balanchine), 1951, and Tyl Ulenspeigel (Balanchine), 1951. Personalities represented include Frederick Ashton, George Balanchine, Erik Bruhn, Alexandra Danilova, Margot Fonteyn, Martha Graham, Nora Kaye, and John Kriza.
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