In the postwar years, America was unduly blessed by its art dealers, who offered an open door to the avant-garde, and by its fashion magazines, in which a handful of photographers managed to turn fashion pictures into another kind of high art. Chief among them was Irving Penn, who died last week, at the age of ninety-two. There are many instinctive romantics among popular artists, the Gershwins and the Chaplins who, through force of spirit and originality of style, take by storm the balcony and the boxes alike. Penn was something rarer, an instinctive popular classicist, with a magical gift for visual rhythm, for making something insignificant—a pattern of cigarettes and ashes, each ash miraculously in its one best place—look as formally inevitable as an eighteenthcentury still-life. If Richard Avedon, his great rival and competitor, was a snapshot Delacroix, all fire and figures, Penn was Ingres with a Leica, all ravishing edges and perfect composition and a quality of deep color that was the envy of every other photographer.
Yet there was a vein of humane insight in his work, too. He loved showing people caught in corners, and though this was partly a formal device for breaking the fatuous foregroundversus-background opposition of the usual magazine photograph, it also conveyed a quiet edge of claustrophobia, as if his people had been backed into traps of their own devising.
Penn’s subject—as in “Woman with Long Black Neck (Jean Patchett),” New York, 1951—is not performance but inner poise, and the dignity of appearances became his central theme. His work is a memorial of a specially privileged era, where the duties of a fashion photographer and the ambitions of an artist could coexist in one serenely realized surface, an age that in retrospect seems to have been one of fine silver, coolly applied. ♦
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/19/091019fa_fact_gopnik
Yet there was a vein of humane insight in his work, too. He loved showing people caught in corners, and though this was partly a formal device for breaking the fatuous foregroundversus-background opposition of the usual magazine photograph, it also conveyed a quiet edge of claustrophobia, as if his people had been backed into traps of their own devising.
Penn’s subject—as in “Woman with Long Black Neck (Jean Patchett),” New York, 1951—is not performance but inner poise, and the dignity of appearances became his central theme. His work is a memorial of a specially privileged era, where the duties of a fashion photographer and the ambitions of an artist could coexist in one serenely realized surface, an age that in retrospect seems to have been one of fine silver, coolly applied. ♦
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/10/19/091019fa_fact_gopnik
Thanks to TK
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