New York
It is the besetting sin of comedians that, although they may indeed reveal important truths about politics and the human condition, their ultimate goal, in pursuit of which they will abandon all else, is to get a laugh. It is likewise the defining weakness of fashion photographers—even excellent ones like Irving Penn, the subject of a show at the Met through July 30—that, whatever else they think they are doing, their highest goal is ever and always to generate a sense of glamour. Penn’s expertise, his mastery of all the technical and rhetorical tricks of his trade, is so manifest that we are tempted to suspect—as the Met exhibition tacitly suggests—that he has transcended the genre in which he chose to work. Whether he has is the question before us.
Irving Penn (1917-2009) was born 100 years ago in Plainfield, New Jersey, and grew up in Philadelphia and New York, the son of a Jewish watchmaker from Russia. Penn never forgot his humble beginnings and, unlike such pedigreed peers as Cecil Beaton and George Hoyningen-Huene, he always felt like something of an interloper in the rarefied pantheon of Vogue fashion photographers. Surely that feeling was an essential factor in the evolution of Penn’s formal idiom, which, by the time he reached 40, had moved beyond the effeteness of his antecedents toward the more earthy, muscular, even proletarian tone favored by postwar culture as a whole. Whether Penn depicted Peruvian peasants or T. S. Eliot standing before a burlap curtain, whether the natives of New Guinea, a cigarette butt, or the smudged face of Caroline Trentini in the latest Chanel, the guiding theme of his images was an aggressive protestation of honesty and a clamorous rejection of the mannered insubstantiality of most earlier fashion photography.
At a time when the consciousness of the entire world had been shaken to its core by the convulsions of World War II, it might initially have seemed barbaric—to paraphrase Theodor Adorno—to make fashion photography at all. But when our culture finally regained the stomach for such things, as early as 1947, it demanded something other than what had seemed admirable only a few years before. Into that breach leapt Penn, with his swerving, angular, insolent images of the female form in dubious battle with the latest fashions. Whereas earlier photographers asked little more than that a model be lovely and stand still long enough to exhibit the clothes to advantage, this new photography injected tension and imbalance into the previously untroubled compact between model and viewer. Penn’s manifold strategies included reducing the model to near abstraction: In Black and White Fashion with Handbag, a faceless Jean Patchett has become a sequence of black and white zigzags. Elsewhere Penn introduces a new physicality into his models: Mary Jane Russell provocatively removes tobacco from her tongue, while Ms. Patchett, once again, dives libidinously towards her man over a pair of half-consumed glasses of wine.
In this spirit, as well, Penn moves beyond fashion into such vastly different arenas as still life. The organized chaos of Theatre Accident (1947), quite possibly his best single image, is a symphony of muted browns, beiges, and blacks that exploits the granular textures of an opera glass, a gold case, a purse, and a stopwatch that have tumbled over a woman’s dress shoe onto a carpet. Twenty years later, a comparable disruption is implied in Single Oriental Poppy, which rejects the privileged top of the flower—its zone of licit beauty—to reveal a dangerous underside of bristling thorns and petals as red as an uncooked steak.
From still lifes Penn turned to portraiture, shooting fascinating full-length images of people you wish you had met, like the orbicular Alfred Hitchcock, slouching morosely over a pile of burlap, or Marcel Duchamp cornered between two scuffed and narrow gray walls. Some years later, Penn radically reduced the frame of his portraits to contain the upper body and sometimes only the face of an impish Audrey Hepburn, a caped Cecil Beaton, and a startlingly young and limber Tom Wolfe, dandified in a cream-colored suit.
A variant of these images of the famous and fabulous are Penn’s portraits of working men: a waiter, a chef, a butcher, and so forth, captured in black and white and standing before that ubiquitous burlap that is understood to serve both as a warrant of honesty and as a great equalizer of high and low. These images are, of course, professional and accomplished. But that very competence heightens our sense that something is missing. Although these photographs are inspired by August Sander’s great People of the 20th Century (begun 1911), the differences are instructive. The technical perfection of both men is complete, but in Penn there seems to be little beyond the image itself. Despite the aggressive assertion of unvarnished truth that is the chosen mannerism of his art, despite the implicit one-world humanism of his more ethnological portraits of the women of Morocco and the children of Dahomey, the one constant of Penn’s photographs is the aspiring after a kind of suspect impressiveness, the attainment of such glamour and chic as might excite the envy and emulation of the readers of Vogue.
Unlike our present period of culture, which seems in a general way to promote political relevance above all else, the postwar era in which Irving Penn flourished gave pride of place to the exaltation of our common humanity. But that goal obviously conflicted with the inherent exceptionalism that is the stock in trade of the fashion industry, from the designers and models to the photographers and the consumers. Penn’s ingenious solution was to transmute that common humanity into marketable glamour, and he appears to have shrewdly surmised that few if any among his intended viewers would care or even notice. Much of Penn’s work lives in confounding those very divergent goals. His achievement is admirable as long as it is understood as fashion photography, directly or by other means. It begins to fall seriously short only when it presumes upon a higher status to which it has no claim.
James Gardner’s latest book is Buenos Aires: The Biography of a City.
