Irving Penn at Pace MacGill

The current exhibit, Irving Penn: On Assignment, at Pace MacGill's space on West 25th Street is a retrospective of the work Irving Penn completed while on assignment for Condé Nast.  It was the editorial photographs that Penn shot for Vogue over an almost seventy year period that formed the core of his work.  As Vince Aletti writes on one of the exhibit's wall texts:

"If Irving Penn never did another thing in his career but make pictures for the pages of Vogue, his place in photography's pantheon would still be assured.  From the beginning, in 1943, it was clear that Penn saw the magazine as a practical framework, not a limitation.  Encouraged by Alexander Liberman, Vogue's brilliant art director and a lifelong mentor, he challenged himself and the medium; he was inspired and relentlessly inventive."

The connection to Liberman is crucial.  As another of the exhibit's wall texts states:

"No one person in this 'system' was more important to Penn that his dear friend and collaborator, Alexander Liberman.  Beginning in 1943, Liberman expressed a deep belief in Penn, his work, and its originality.  Liberman nurtured Penn and, for decades, the two men conjured up scores of assignments together."

The photos shown at Pace MacGill are divided into several groups.  There are the location shoots from the Worlds in a Small Room series that include Morocco, Dahomey and Cuzco.  The most affecting of the location work is that shot in San Francisco in 1967 when Penn photographed the rock groups, the hippie families and the Hell's Angels.  There are also a great number of portraits, the most notable of which are the "corner" portraits - including those of Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, John O'Hara, Igor Stravinsky and Truman Capote - shot in a claustrophobic space in Penn's studio.  The sitters' reactions to the confined angular nook bring out their true personalities for the camera.  There are also a few examples of Penn's fashion work from 1950 - 51 featuring his wife Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn.

The bulk of the black & white photos on display are silver gelatin prints, many of them vintage prints.  Penn was a master printer and these represent a tour de force of technique.  It is amazing to see in Girl in a Manta (Cuzco, 1948) the gradations Penn is able to achieve in the various shades of black in which all detail is preserved.  The exceptions to the silver gelatin work are several platinum palladium prints mounted to aluminum.  Penn was famous for his rediscovery of this process which allows for a much greater range of tonal values, and these prints are extremely well executed examples of his achievement.

One interesting artifact shown at the exhibit is one of two identical albums into which Penn glued frames cut from contact sheets.  He kept one album and regularly sent the other to Liberman as it was updated so that the two men could discuss by telephone, with the albums open before them, the photos from assignments that would work best in a published article.

The exhibit continues through October 26, 2013.