Met Museum: Irving Penn Centennial

The problem facing any gallery or museum that attempts to mount a retrospective of Irving Penn's photographs is the sheer volume of material available for presentation.  Penn's career spanned some six decades from the mid-1940's well into the first decade of the twenty-first century.  During this period he worked continuously and in every decade produced some of the most iconic photographs of the post war era.  Beyond that, he was a gifted darkroom technician who almost single handedly revived the platinum printing process that provided far greater depth and tonal range than the use of silver bromide paper allowed.  In one instance, four prints of the same image (Girl Drinking) have been placed side by side at this exhibit to demonstrate the different effects that could be achieved by alternating between hand-made platinum and commercially manufactured silver gelatin papers.

The Met Museum's current Centennial exhibit solves the problem of what photographs to show from such a large body of work by showcasing the "landmark promised gift from The Irving Penn Foundation to The Met of more than 150 photographs by Penn, representing every period of the artist's dynamic career with the camera."  Fortunately, this gift contains an excellent cross section of the artist's oeuvre and contains some of the best examples of his work available in each genre.  In addition, on display are photographs that entered the Met's collection prior to this acquisition.

The exhibit begins with several examples of Penn's early street photography shot in 1941 when the artist would have been approximately 24 years old.  To be honest, these early attempts, many of them nothing more than straightforward representations of store signs, are not particularly remarkable in themselves but are still worth seeing in order to obtain a better appreciation of what would follow.

The next steps Penn would take were a series of what the museum refers to as "existential portraits."  Most of these were completed in 1947-1948 and featured such subjects as Alfred Hitchcock, Spencer Tracy, Peter Ustinov, Salvador Dali, Truman Capote and Marcel Duchamp.  The best is a portrait of Mrs. Armory Carhart - displayed here in an uncropped print that shows the studio equipment surrounding the background curtain - that gives an early indication of Penn's talent as a fashion photographer.  The fashion photographs themselves depict with wit and style the world of haute couture as it existed in New York City in the late 1940's and early 1950's.  Included among them are many photos featuring Lisa Fonssagrives, the elegant Swedish model whom Penn would eventually marry.

It's important to note at this point that Penn had a great deal of expert help in developing his talent.  Before even taking up photography, he had already studied art in Philadelphia under Alexey Brodovich, art director of Harper's Bazaar.  In New York, Penn's earliest portrait and fashion assignments, mentioned above, were given him when he joined the staff of Vogue and came under the direction of Alexander Liberman.  Liberman proved the perfect mentor for Penn, and he was always wise enough to give full rein to his protege's creativity.  In many respects, Liberman was the type of art director most editorial photographers can only dream of working for.

One of Penn's most important long running projects was photographing tradespeople in the outfits in which they worked.  These individuals included everyone from a waiter to a balloon saleman to a "rag and bone" man.  Although the documentation accompanying the exhibit made no mention of this that I could see, these photographs clearly show the influence of the German photographer August Sander who completed a similar project, entitled People of the 20th Century, during the Weimar period.  Penn extended this concept when he traveled to such exotic locations as Peru, New Guinea and Dahomey.  When photographing alien cultures, Penn was always careful to show total respect both to his sitters and to the societies to which they belonged no matter how far different from his own.  In addition to their importance as photographs, these images also have a distinct anthropological value.

Other genres Penn pursued were still lifes, fine art nudes and close-up studies of cigarette butts, the last blown up so large that they are monumental in appearance.  Although these are all stunning technical achievements, none of them in my opinion rises to the level of greatness achieved in Penn's portrait and fashion photography.

A few of the tools used by Penn in his work are also on display.  These include a battered theater curtain that he invariably used as a backdrop for his portraits as well as a Rolleiflex 3.5 E3 twin lens reflex camera with 75 mm Carl Zeiss Planar lens.  The focal length of the lens is notable.  It is a "normal" lens rather than the short telephoto (approximately 150 mm) normally used for portrait work.

Irving Penn was born on June 16, 1917. Today would have been his 100th birthday.

The exhibit continues through July 30, 2017.