What’s Happening: A new documentary from writer-director Sam Shahid gathers art-world luminaries and Lynes’s former associates to pull back the curtain on an erotic body of work that was far ahead of its place in time and society in 1930s New York City.

The Download: George Platt Lynes, a young Yale dropout in 1926, had his sights set on becoming a writer. An introduction to publisher Monroe Wheeler and his partner, the writer Glenway Wescott, blossomed into a 30-year romance with the couple and led to Lynes taking up his true calling as a photographer, as told by Sam Shahid’s new documentary, Hidden Master. One of Lynes’ earliest portraits was taken at Wheeler and Wescott’s French Riviera residence, and captured Jean Cocteau with a telescope as he awaited the arrival of a fleet of sailors to the bar downstairs. Before long, Lynes was running in Gertude Stein’s circle of expat intellectuals, taking portraits of Isamu Noguchi, Henri Cartier Bresson, and Katharine Hepburn.

Despite the lyrical poeticism of Lynes’ love letters to Wheeler—“All here is wind and wisteria, and I long for your shadowy beauty,” is one of many evocative lines—his writing career never materialized. Instead, his star-making turn as a photographer of Stein’s opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, and a fortuitous meeting with art dealer Julien Levy while en route to Paris put Lynes at the center of New York City’s burgeoning photography scene in the 1930s. His inclusion in MoMA’s first-ever photo exhibition, along with his early adoption of innovations like ring lighting and wide angle shots, skyrocketed him to the status of the “most important fashion photographer in America” by the age of 26, according to gallerist John Stevenson.

But the art experts throughout Hidden Master, including Leslie-Lohman Museum co-founder Charles Leslie, Kinsey Institute curator Rebecca Fasman, and writer-curator Jarrett Earnest, help viewers see that for all its deserved acclaim, Lynes’ legacy transcends his fashion and portrait commissions. He harnessed his mastery over posing, lighting, and large format cameras to capture the minute details of his subjects to establish the erotic male nude as its own genre within fine art photography.

Long before Peter Hujar, Robert Mapplethorpe, or Andy Warhol, Lynes blazed a perilous trail, capturing intimacy, physicality, and even interracial homoeroticism, all through the McCarthy years and the Lavender Scare. But unlike his fashion, portrait, and dance photos—Lincoln Kirstein appointed Lynes as the official photographer of New York City Ballet—Lynes’ nudes were only ever shown to his closest friends during his lifetime. If not for a serendipitous meeting and close working relationship with Alfred Charles Kinsey, whose foundation Lynes bequeathed his nudes to, they might have been lost to history forever.

In Their Own Words: “Part of what looks so contemporary about George Platt Lynes and this group of artists in general is the way that their art deals with sexuality seems fun,” Earnest says in the documentary. “One of the things that’s really deadly about looking at this group of artists and this time in history is to try and be way too serious about it… when Paul Cadmus, Jared French, and Margaret French started a collaborative, they called it PaJaMa. It’s a silly name. The work that they did was take pictures of their friends naked in Fire Island—this is not the society for contemplating existential dread.”

Surface Says: With Hidden Master, Lynes got his due at OutFest, New Fest, and the Palm Springs International Film Festival. Naturally, we’re wondering when we can expect his museum retrospective.

Have a news story our readers need to see? Write to our editors.

Reach the design world every morning. Find out more about advertising in the Design Dispatch.

According to the architects, Miguel Valverde and Daniel Villanueva of Guadalajara-based firm V Taller, the collection of mesmerizing vacation residences comprising Babel Tulum owes its uncanny valley effect to their use of a single material. A pale pink plaster mimics chukum, a Mayan building material made from tree resin, and instills cohesion among the rhythmic undulation of arched balconies and windows.

Residents of the 59-unit complex can choose from a full suite of wellness amenities that begin with the architecture itself: the circular form prioritizes the distribution of natural light and views of the surrounding landscape. Sound baths, a meditation altar, massage cabins, a steam room, and an on-site vegetarian restaurant round out the list. Inside each unit, interiors studio Carlos y Pablo forge a calming sense of place through use of sandstone plaster, parota wood, art from photographer Manuel Zúñiga, and ceramics by the artisans behind Encrudo.

A Palestinian textile designer who hails from Los Angeles, Nina Mohammad has spent more than a decade living in Tangier, where she champions Morocco’s talented craftspeople and their time-honored craft traditions through the Artisan Project. Though primarily focused on textiles, her quality-driven studio helps local makers realize everything from lighting and decorative accents to furniture. Her approach has even caught the attention of Stüssy, which recently released a second collaboration of boucherouite rugs using the streetwear label’s upcycled T-shirts and wool from the Atlas Mountains.

When: June 5–July 13

Where: Carpenters Workshop Gallery, London

What: Ingrid Donat has long wielded a painterly approach to temper bronze—her material of choice—with warmth, personality, and texture. The Paris-born designer has spent two years creating her latest masterpiece, the Commode Ooni, which employs scarification techniques to engulf the piece in repetitive lines from front to back that humanize the bronze’s usually smooth surface. Created with 15 artisans and a specialist foundry, the commode will be joined by six other works that highlight the convergence of her craftsmanship and singular vision.

Phillip Jividen’s works are about creating timeless pieces that feel familiar yet unexpected. Using intuitive forms that are a balance between practicality and playfulness, his design process is an exploration of material and composition as a means to create objects that instills a sense of permanence.

Surface Says: Jividen achieves the unlikely by bringing texture, warmth, and personality to stone, wood, glass, and aluminum through his explorations of form and composition.

A flashy new tome chronicles the life of cult New York City store Liquid Sky.

Apex, the largest stegosaurus fossil ever found, is hitting the auction block.

Dopamine is now a cultural catchall for focus, but what does that really mean?

The Notre-Dame cathedral is rising, but this time in highly detailed Legos.