George Platt Lynes was a highly-regarded pre-war fashion photographer whose studies of male nudes were deemed too erotic for public exhibition at that time. Lynes was a pioneer in this genre, and his style influenced many recent photographers, including Mapplethorpe and Weber. Emphasizing those which have been least published, this book reproduces 80 of his most striking images, half of them nudes - male and female - and all drawn from an archive of 600 prints collected by Alfred Kinsey, founder of the Kinsey Institute. James Crump has contributed two essays, one about Lynes's role in the avant-garde and the other concerning the male erotic sub-culture of which his private world was a part.