Lynes was part of an important gay artistic community in New York that included writers W.H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, and E.M. Forster and painters Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and George Tooker. At the center was writer and ballet impresario Lincoln Kirstein, who co-founded the New York City Ballet. Kirstein frequently commissioned Lynes, whose inventive and surrealist images, George Balanchine claimed, “synthesized better than anyone else the atmosphere of some of my ballets.”

Although he had a successful career in dance, fashion, and portraiture photography, Lynes’s ultimate passion was the male nude. Over the course of two decades, he made several thousand such images, gradually stripping away prop and narrative to focus exclusively on the human form. These erotic and explicit images were almost never exhibited, and Lynes destroyed many of them shortly before his death. But he left almost 600 prints and 2,000 negatives to the institute of sexologist Alfred Kinsey to assist in the study of human sexuality.

—Text taken from the Carter Handbook (2023)