George Platt Lynes began preparing a book of portraits before his death in 1955, but the project did not appear during his lifetime. Portrait 1927–1955 gathers work from a period extending from his early photographs in Paris to his later sittings in New York. Published by Twin Palms in 1994, the volume brings this range of portrait photography together with a foreword by Lincoln Kirstein.

Among the people pictured are writers, artists and performers, including Tennessee Williams, Colette, André Gide, Gertrude Stein, W. H. Auden, Paul Cadmus, Igor Stravinsky and T. S. Eliot. Self-portraits place Lynes within the field of faces he photographed. The gathering invites readers to consider portraiture as an encounter between individuals while also attending to the cultural relationships suggested by the group. A familiar name can provide one point of entry, but the appearance of the person in the photograph remains another.

The hardcover contains 132 pages and 100 gravure plates, in an approximately eleven-by-fourteen-inch format. Its scale gives the portraits space within the physical book. Kirstein’s foreword supplies a textual introduction, while the collection of photographs offers a sustained opportunity to compare different faces and individual encounters. These two forms of attention can accompany one another without requiring each image to illustrate a single argument.

Reading the book can involve moving between the span of years named in the title and the particular moment suggested by a portrait. The dates establish a broad frame, while each photograph presents an individual whose presence cannot be reduced to that chronology. Lynes’s own self-portraits add another dimension, bringing the maker of the images into the same space of looking.