Irving Penn is one of the leading photographers of the 20th century. His elegant and innovative photographs are the subject of this volume. It includes some 200 images.
Irving Penn is one of the leading photographers of the 20th century. His elegant and innovative photographs are the subject of this volume. It includes some 200 images.
Still Life: Irving Penn Photographs 1938-2000
144
Still Life: Irving Penn Photographs 1938-2000
144Hardcover
-
SHIP THIS ITEMTemporarily Out of Stock Online
-
PICK UP IN STORE
Your local store may have stock of this item.
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Irving Penn is one of the leading photographers of the 20th century. His elegant and innovative photographs are the subject of this volume. It includes some 200 images.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780821227022 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Bulfinch |
| Publication date: | 09/28/2001 |
| Pages: | 144 |
| Product dimensions: | 10.75(w) x 11.25(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Irving Penn's books include Moments Preserved (1960), Worlds in a Small Room (1974), Inventive Paris Clothes 1909-1939 (1977), Flowers (1980), and Passage (1991). A retrospective of his work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1984. In 1997, the Art Institute of Chicago mounted a traveling international exhibition.
Read an Excerpt
Still Life
Irving Penn Photographs 1938-2000By Irving Penn
Bulfinch Press
Copyright © 2001 John SzarkowskiAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-821-22702-5
Chapter One
Penn Still LifesPhotography's first still life was a picture of a table set for a simple meal, made by Nicephor Niepce in about 1827-years before the world even knew that there was such a thing as photography. Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre, Niepce's collaborator, made a still life by 1837. The other two of photography's principal inventors-William Henry Fox Talbot and Hippolyte Bayard-were a little tardier, but both had completed their entries before 1840.
These first attempts all seem to me remarkably good, and one might think that by now the problem might have been finally solved, or at least exhausted, but it is on the contrary full of life, as demonstrated by the work of Zeke Berman, Joan Fontcumberta, Lee Friedlander, Jan Groover, and Abelard Morrel, for examples, as well as that of the old master who has gathered together here, from the work of a long half century, his own definition of his contribution to the ancient genre.
In spite of his famous modesty of manner, Penn is neither naive nor artistically unlettered. He is no downy-cheeked neophyte with a book dummy under his arm, and he surely understands that a book of still lifes by him, after all these years, will be regarded as a most serious claim and that, as we look at these pictures, the great still life tradition cannot be far from our conscious thought. If he had done a book of war photographs, or of fashion photographs, we might have looked at the pictures as describing the history of events that were to a degree independent of their description, but the raw material of still life seems an issue that lies outside of history, except for art history. It is only the art of still life that seems to have a history (except perhaps to pomologists), and therefore a book of still lifes by a living artist will inevitably make us remember the work of Chardin and all his great company.
During the second half of the twentieth century (and in fact beginning a few years earlier) Irving Penn has been one of photography's conspicuous innovators and distinguished performers in at least two of the medium's oldest and most successful genres: still life and portraiture. The fact that we now are or soon will be in a new century (depending on whether or not we can count to ten) should not prevent him from continuing to surprise and delight us in both these areas of work, if he should choose to do so.
High success is in itself surprising, but it is very rare for a photographer to be preeminent in both portraiture and still life. Before Penn, only Edward Weston comes to mind. In painting also it is unusual for an artist to be equally at home in both genres, until modern times, when painters from Manet to Picasso turned the trick, perhaps by somehow turning their portrait sitters into the more lasting stuff of still life.
Portraiture and still life would seem to require very different talents and sensibilities: still life is the genre in which the artist has the highest degree of control over the subject, and portraiture the one in which the artist's control is most compromised by the will of the subject. The best portraitists may be those who are successful at establishing a psychic exchange-a current of mutual interest-between themselves and their sitters. This is why Etienne Carjat (1828-1906)-good as he was-was not often as good as Nadar (1820-1910) and why the many imitators of Diane Arbus (1923-1971) found to their surprise and dismay that while it was easy enough to mimic her simple formal strategies, they did not make pictures like hers.
A good portraitist would be unlikely to admit it, but on a very basic level one might say that a portrait is a battle between two wills for the control of the sitter's soul. The best portraits, then, would be not those where the artist wins too easy a battle (as with John Sargent) but the contests that end in hard-won ties; and the greatest of those would be between two champions, e.g., Velasquez vs. Innocent X, or the aging Rembrandt vs. himself.
Some might think that it would be disabling for a photographer to think of his (her) work in terms of such grand exemplars-that it might keep a photographer from ever pushing the button. There might be some truth to this, and not just for photographers. I have had many chances to ask photographers whether they had ever thought about stepping into the ring with Velasquez, or even with Nadar, and I have never done so, not chiefly because the question is vulgar (which is not always a bad thing) but for fear that it might be disabling. On the other hand, it might be that the best photographers do not think (in the common sense) while actually working. In this case high ambition during the cocktail hour, or other moments of retro- or introspection, might not hurt them.
In any case, even the bravest of artists might prefer not to spend their entire lives engaged in one heroic competition after another, like the photographer attempting serious portraits every day. Even Hemingway's old fisherman might have preferred on weekends to go fish in a small stream for a shy foot-long trout that would threaten nothing but his ego. Or, alternatively, the old man might tire of his weekday job if the size or quality of the big fish declined: one or two flashy jumps and then abject surrender. Or again, an artist might cultivate both portraiture and still life simply because a change is a rest. The two genres offer different kinds of contests: in the case of the portrait we are given as raw material not a lemon and a loaf of bread, but a human being, a thing wondrous beyond comprehension-an opinion shared by virtually all our deepest thinkers, excepting only H. L. Mencken and a few other skeptics ruined by journalism. For the portrait photographer the challenge might be to suggest how the particular unique wonder now playing the part of sitter differs, in some significant or at least amusing way, from the three billion other potential sitters who are in principle equally wonderful.
With still life the problem is stood on its head: we are given apples and pears and dead game, objects seldom addressed in ringing poetic apologues-except occasionally, as with the author of the Songs of Solomon, who wrote: Comfort me with apples/for I am sick of love. In general, the stuff of still life, although in principle unique, interests us chiefly as exemplars of a more or less undifferentiated class. The other difference between the two genres is that it is very difficult even to get the living sitter to occupy the frame exactly as one would wish, to say nothing of the gesture of the head, shoulders, eyes, facial muscles, and the rest of what makes up what is called the expression; whereas with the apples and pears we have an absolutely submissive subject: we can place them as we wish, and they will stay there, slumping only very slowly. It is in fact their submissiveness that makes them difficult. It is said that Cezanne (I think) would arrange the fruit with his hands behind his back, facing away from the table, in order to overcome the natural tendency of fruit, dead fish, etc., to arrange themselves in conventional compositions.
I had hoped in this essay to compare Penn's early still lifes for Vogue with those that the magazine had published in the preceding years, but I found no still lifes in the issues of the preceding years, unless I counted the dreary nuts-and-bolts, one-column product photos or the occasional how-to-do-it pictures, showing how one might arrange the napkins and flatware for the buffet, that accompanied articles with titles such as "Impromptu Entertaining." It would seem that the fashion-magazine still life might have been Penn's invention, perhaps in league with his collaborator and friend Alexander Liberman, art director of Conde Nast almost forever. A still life by Penn appeared as the cover of the magazine as early as October of 1943; but a few months later Penn volunteered for the American Field Service, and the still life idea seems to have been put aside until he returned after the war. In 1946 the idea was reintroduced in Vogue as a sort of side dish to portraiture. The two August issues of 1946 include color portraits by Penn of Orson Welles and Helen Hayes, each posed along with a still life-a potpourri of objects that were said to symbolize their inner selves. This was a conceit so transparently synthetic that it probably did not fool even the readership. In any event, the experiment was dropped after several tries. By 1947, however, Penn was producing a cornucopia of dazzling still lifes, seven of which are reproduced here. In the same enormous year he also produced some of his most memorable portraits.
Although one cannot compare Penn's magazine still lifes with those that had come before, one can say that their character was parallel to the character of his portraits and his fashion pictures, which is to say that they were very surprising, and produced a pleasurable frisson-an awareness that we were suddenly in unfamiliar territory. His fashion pictures claimed that the new gowns were so good that they did not need to play second fiddle to some fanciful fairy-tale narrative, and his portraits claimed that these people were so interesting that they did not need to be photographed with a castle, or a symphony orchestra, or a marvelous Neopolitan slum in the background. And the still lifes claimed that the quotidian raw materials of cooking and eating-heads of cheese, cleavers, sides of beef, sculpted butcher blocks, and also abandoned demitasse cups, cigarette butts on saucers, lipstick stains on a liquor glass, etc.-if properly seen, contained all the necessary plot elements and the essential hints from which any reasonable reader might construct a story proper to her own circumstance.
The established photographers who were regularly used by Vogue in 1946 comprised a distinguished group, which included Cecil Beaton, Horst, Erwin Blumenfeld, Frances McLaughlin, and John Rawlings, and it would surely be possible to identify an individual style for each of them. But with Penn's first mature work, when he was perhaps thirty, the work of all those others seemed in comparison complicated, even if in different ways. The magazine's fashion pictures had been full of elaborate gesture, suggesting overdressed ballerinas who were no longer quite as supple as they had once been, lit by enough klieg lights to film Gone With the Wind. In Penn's fashion pictures the vitality was not in the gesture of the model but in the line of the image. If the silhouette was active, the model could be freed from all that extraneous athleticism and be assigned what appeared to be an almost normal stance. And the light became as simple, natural and pure as that of a north-facing skylight. Nothing so apparently simple had been seen in the magazines. On some level it even fooled young provincial photographers such as the writer, who might have wondered (for a moment) whether the photographer might be one of the older fellows, someone whose first employer might have once met the aged Mathew Brady.
This new simplicity belonged to Penn on the level of bone-deep intuition, and during the early postwar years it was also perfect for the magazine. Both high art and high fashion then still came from Europe, where empty rooms and empty walls seemed badges of honor, representing a clean slate, a new beginning, as well as a confirmation of political integrity. After six years of war, luxurious surroundings smacked of collaboration or other forms of villainy.
Beyond the aspect of simplicity but related to it was the assumption of naivete, or faux naivete, that made Penn's pictures seem more straightforward, and therefore more honest, than those of photographers who worked in a more flowery style. But in fact it is not clear that some artistic styles-some forms of artifice-are more conducive to honesty than others. It does seem clear that honesty must mean something different to a magician than to an accountant. It is also clear that both the simplicity and the naivete in Penn were very ingeniously crafted.
The idea that fashion photographs might be made under a skylight-under cool, understated, factual, pre-Edison, nineteenth-century, God-made light-was a brilliant conceit, which might have lasted two or three issues but for the fact that Penn's photographs were very beautiful and transcended tactics. On the basis of these pictures the conceit became a standard procedure of the industry, and hard-edged shadows were virtually expunged from the fashion magazines. The new technical vocabulary established by Penn was the first change of the sort brought to the fashion magazines for a quarter century, since the great Edward Steichen brought Edison's incandescent lights to Conde Nast's magazines. Steichen's contribution was thoroughly functional; photomechanical reproduction in the better magazines of the mid-twenties had become reasonably good, but not nearly as good as Steichen made it look by using cinematic lighting to divide his subject into a few clearly textured tones of gray. Between the mid-thirties and the late forties magazine reproduction had not improved substantially, so Penn had to manage his daylight-real or feigned-so that it would suggest the infinite subtlety of the north skylight while being restricted in fact to a very abbreviated gray scale. He managed this by the expressiveness of his drawing-the line of the edges that defined his shapes-and by a superb graphic sense that led him to arrange his short palette of grays in a pattern that would suggest a black as deep as an etching's, and a scale as seamless as that of a trombone.
In 1950, as a member of a symposium at the Museum of Modern Art, Penn expressed boldly and with obvious pleasure the confidence of a young professional enjoying the full command of his powers. He said, "The modern photographer ... works for publication.... The end product of his efforts is the printed page, not the photographic print." Yet at the same time that he was expressing in public his entire satisfaction with the opportunities offered by the magazine, he was producing in private a series of highly experimental nudes for which he could see no public venue. In his early thirties Penn had already established a second, parallel, and private track for his work, in which he could pursue those problems that had no journalistic valence.
It was said earlier that any retrospective summing up of an artist's work in still life-in contrast to the other, more topical genres-is likely to be weighed in the balance with his greatest predecessors. There is probably no way to avoid this unfair contest, in which a living artist is compared with a whole squad or even a platoon of dead masters averaging hundreds of years of age. But if the issue cannot be avoided, it can be framed with more or less precision.
Continues...
Excerpted from Still Life by Irving Penn Copyright © 2001 by John Szarkowski. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.