Born in New Jersey, in 1907, George Platt Lynes was an aspiring writer, and at 18 he moves to Paris where he meets Gertrude Stein and Man Ray. He returns to study at Yale, but past a few months, in 1926, he moves to New York, where he discovers photography and starts taking pictures of celebrities, rapidly moving on to his extravagant fashion shots – where his surrealistic influence was evident. But his true passion resided in a much more obscure place: sex and the male nude. These photos, radically explicit for their time, only recently have been disclosed and appreciated, having had a radical influence on the work of contemporary photographers such as Herb Ritts or Robert Mapplethorpe. Focusing mainly on this less acknowledged side of Lynes’ work, Hidden Master: the Legacy of George Platt Lynes sublimely traces a parallel between the way the photographer lived his own sexuality, and how he transferred that desire into these photos, many of them as of today hidden in boxes, as per indication of Lynes himself, before his death at the age of 47. J.F.