Pioneer hero

George Platt Lynes was, of course, a pioneering photographer of the male nude, active from the late 1920s onwards.

His work, consciously or not, is copied every day by arty pornographers trying to get shots which celebrate the male body. Like this one:

But that photographer doesn't have even a fraction of the technical brilliance of Lynes:

Which makes it all the more shocking that the only images of his I could find on the web were such small, pissy little jpegs...

Platt Lynes needs to be seen big, massive even, so you can luxuriate in the gorgeousness of his work (a huge book called, simply, The Male Nudes came out a while back and is well worth investing in).

My scanner has been buried for a few weeks under a pile of books and DVDs (I've run out of shelf space again), so I can't actually make any images for you. But I'll come back to that at some point.

In the meantime, that (above) was an image of the photographer himself, posing on the other side of the camera for Man Ray. The image is so poor I'm almost embarrassed to include it in what is supposed to be an homage to genius.

In the meantime, let's all raise a glass to a heroic pioneer of the imagery we all love so much -- without him our visual world would be much the poorer.