Margaret Sundell
An exhibition locates the echoing visual schema found throughout the photographer’s seventy-year career.
Irving Penn: Kinship, installation view. Courtesy Pace Gallery. Pictured, center, on right wall: Cigarette No. 17, 1972. Far right, on right wall: Two Miyake Warriors (B), 1998.
Irving Penn: Kinship, curated by Hank Willis Thomas, Pace Gallery, 508 West Twenty-Fifth Street, New York City, through February 22, 2025
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There is an anomalous image among the forty-three photographs by Irving Penn that conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas has selected and arrayed at Pace New York. Street in Rabat (1951) is a picture of a narrow alley, capped by a series of slightly pointed archways. A woman and children move along it in a blur. One of the children, the blurriest, appears to run. It’s by no means odd to discover Penn’s camera in a setting far away from his perch at Vogue (where he worked for more than sixty years, until his death in 2009). The magazine sent him to Lima for a fashion shoot in 1948; he stayed on and sought out the remote, mountainous city of Cuzco, photographing its Indigenous inhabitants. Between 1967 and 1971, Penn voyaged to numerous destinations: Dahomey (present-day Benin), New Guinea, and Morocco. (The fruits of these excursions first appeared in Vogue and were compiled in the 1974 book Worlds in a Small Room.) What’s unusual is not to find the photographer outside New York but to find him out of doors. Penn was a creature of the studio, setting subjects against mural paper, controlling the flow of light and meticulously printing his images to render the greatest expressive range of photography’s gray scale, from stark white to velvet black and all the tones in between. When traveling, he rented studios or set up makeshift ones, capturing people of varied cultures in exactly the same manner that he shot models wearing haute couture. There was no blurring in either case. In the studio, everything was sharp, pristine, and under the photographer’s purview.
Irving Penn, Street in Rabat, 1951. Courtesy Pace Gallery. © Irving Penn Foundation.
The studio became not just a backdrop but also a prop in his “corner portraits,” begun in 1948, which presented luminaries of the day—from Georgia O’Keeffe to Truman Capote to Joe Louis. The photographer wedged his subjects in between two gray stage-walls that met at a sharply angled V. Negotiating this spatial constraint, sometimes with the aid of a chair, they stood stiffly, crouched nervously, sprawled confrontationally, and otherwise revealed themselves to Penn’s lens. In homage, Thomas has transformed Pace’s first-floor gallery into a series of gray angled walls, radiating outward from a central star shape. Corners abound. The artist has playfully displayed “corner portraits” in some. But this is not the kind of doubling with which Thomas is most concerned. Titled Irving Penn: Kinship, his show’s central aim is to identify visual schema and compositional themes that echo across the long arc of the photographer’s career.
Irving Penn: Kinship, installation view. Courtesy Pace Gallery. Pictured, far left: Single Oriental Poppy (A), 1968. Second from far left: Three Dahomey Girls (with Bowls), 1967.
The colorful chunks of lipstick in a commercial image from 1982 are arranged to similar effect as the New Yorker artists in a 1947 group portrait for Vogue; they also rhyme with the blocks of steel in the still life Arrangement of 15 Pieces (1980). A coat by designer Edward Molyneux, captured in 1950, bulges and curves like the naked torso of dancer Alexandra Beller (1999), and the twinned vertical figures in Two Miyake Warriors (1998) mirror a pair of monumental-seeming cigarette butts from 1972. Given the particular scope of Penn’s work, formal affinities can make for strange bedfellows, ones that conjoin center and periphery, person and thing. For instance, we rediscover the billowing nightgown of a young girl named Juliet Auchincloss (1949) in the curved headdress of an Enga tribesman (1970), and find the gap that subdivides an assembly of Hell’s Angels from 1967 again in a gathering of six members of the Asaro tribe in New Guinea shot in 1970. Most strikingly, three Dahomey girls carrying bowls on their heads (1967) bear an uncanny resemblance to the three stalks and stigmas of a flower—an oriental poppy photographed in 1968.
Irving Penn: Kinship, installation view. Courtesy Pace Gallery. Pictured, left to right, on left and center walls: Edifice, 1979; Lipstick Chunks, 1982; New Yorker Artists, 1947; Arrangement of 15 Pieces, 1980.
In his curatorial statement, Thomas talks of a “visual memory” that animates Penn’s seventy-year career, which he likens to muscle memory—the photographer’s eye, he suggests, creates and then repeats certain formal schemas over time. Since most of the groupings on view comprise only two pictures, there’s always a chance that these echoes might be one-offs. That’s what I suspected leaving the show. Perusing the doorstop of a catalog for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2017 retrospective Irving Penn: Centennial, though, underscores the rightness of Thomas’s thesis. In it, the motif of “threes” appears again and again; the “subdivided group” is everywhere. Challenging the idea that an artist’s work develops in a linear fashion, Thomas presents instead a looping movement that circles back on itself, “as if [Penn’s] creative impulses were vestiges of a deeper, enduring vision.” One could also argue that, through these repeated schema, Penn is organizing the world to fit his formal parameters, imposing himself on reality as he discovered it. The results are brilliant—his images are at once bold and nuanced, elegant and alive. Still, it’s hard not to feel that they are the outcome of a controlling gaze. Tellingly, Penn said of the people he shot in a corner, “They couldn’t run away . . . and they belonged to me as subjects for that moment of time.”
Irving Penn, Cigarette No. 17, 1972. Courtesy Pace Gallery. © Irving Penn Foundation.
Thomas extols the consistent achievement of Penn’s photographs “regardless of subject.” “It’s as if each image,” he continues, “carries an echo of his broader artistic ethos: the belief that beauty and meaning can be found in the most unlikely places.” Penn’s cigarette butts come to mind, along with a question: Does Penn “find” the beauty that inheres in them, or does he imbue them with it, or at least with a grandeur that elevates his lowly subjects into something worthy of our regard? These are not just cigarette butts sitting in an ashtray or on the sidewalk; they have been submitted to a series of artistic maneuvers: selected for their symmetry, they are shot against a plain, white ground and magnified roughly twenty times their actual size. Through these steps, Penn untethers the cigarette butts from the realm of use. There is no way to approach them other than on the level of form and no way to understand them except as aesthetic objects. In this case, it’s a beautiful transformation; but what of the three Dahomey girls, uprooted by the same process from their independent existence outside of Penn’s studio. It is this aestheticization that reduces them to being in some sense equivalent to a three-headed flower. In other words, a product of Penn’s vision.
Margaret Sundell is the editor-in-chief of 4Columns.