Saturday, September 20, 2025 at 2:00 PM
Getty Center, Los Angeles
Like tracer bullets fired into the dark, the great American photographer George Platt Lynes (1907–1955) produced scores of images that traced the trajectory of the gaze. His photographs seem to materialize sight as a social actor: queers looking at each other, non-queers looking at queers, and most strikingly, queers looking at themselves as they come to terms with their own desires. Made in a period in which the gaze was freighted with more meaning and possibility than in our more open era, Lynes’s work is among the earliest to register not just the weight of social stigma, but a self-conscious resistance to stigma as well.