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.
