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Summary
Summary
The definitive book on the work of a virtuosic and revered American photographer
" Irving Penn: Centennial . . . presents page after page of startlingly fresh images."--Luc Sante, New York Times
Irving Penn (1917-2009) was among the most esteemed and influential photographers of the twentieth century. Over the course of a nearly seventy-year career, he mastered a pared-down aesthetic of studio photography that is distinguished for its meticulous attention to composition, nuance, and detail. This indispensable book features one of the largest selections of Penn's photographs ever compiled, including famous and beloved images as well as works that have never been published, spanning the entirety of his groundbreaking career.
An enlightening introduction situates his work in the context of the various artistic, social, and political environments and events that affected the content of his photographs. Lively essays acquaint readers with Penn's primary subjects and campaigns, including early documentary scenes and imagery; portraits; fashion; female nudes; peoples of Peru, Dahomey (Benin), New Guinea, and Morocco; still lifes; and much more. Irving Penn: Centennial is essential for any fan of this artist's work or the history of twentieth-century photography.
Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press
Exhibition Schedule:
de Young, Fine Art Museums, San Francisco
(March 16-July 21, 2024)
Author Notes
Maria Morris Hambourg is an independent curator of photography. Jeff L. Rosenheim is curator in charge of the Department of Photographs at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Reviews (3)
New York Review of Books Review
"if your pictures aren't good enough, you're not close enough," said Robert Capa, famously. Whether or not Irving Penn heard this advice early enough in his career to make any difference, he followed its principles to the letter - he seldom seems to have shot any subject farther away than about 10 feet. He made his living and his initial reputation from fashion and advertising photography, which is to say portraits and still lifes, while on his own initiative he made more portraits and still lifes. He respected and followed both fine-art and vernacular traditions, taking the mottled gray backdrop of early studio photography and making it his own. He discovered a daylight studio in Cuzco, Peru, in 1948 and rented it for a week, shooting locals, and then set up daylight studios of his own in Paris, London and New York to photograph people in the generally doomed small trades (glaziers, tinkers, rag and bone men) in their get-ups and with their accouterments - a motif dating back to the mid-19th century. At the same time he constantly pursued innovation. In the 1940 s he made fashion shots that looked like stills from movies that wouldn't be made until the 1960s; he wedged celebrities into a narrow studio corner or draped them over a carpet-covered mound; he took his daylight studio to Africa, New Guinea and biker enclaves in California, the resulting series blurring the line between ethnography and high fashion. Even the toniest of his advertising still lifes always benefited from a bit of dirt, ash, salt or tobacco crumbs, and in the '70s he took that idea to the limit in his extensive studies of cigarette butts, gigantically enlarged, at once nobly pillar-like, irredeemably filthy and weirdly infused with personality. In later life he immediately understood the most radical Japanese designers and honored their most extreme body-altering confections. He never stopped finding new ground until a year before his death at 92, in 2009. IRVING PENN: Centennial (Metropolitan Museum of Art/Yale University, $70), by Maria Morris Hambourg and Jeff L. Rosenheim, presents page after page of startlingly fresh images, many of them older than you are. Tina Barney's immense tableaus confounded viewers when they first made their appearance some 30 years ago. Besides their sheer, wall-filling size (harbinger of a durable photo-world trend), there was the fact that they documented the wealthy, and furthermore were made by one of that number; Barney's early work in particular was devoted to her family and friends in Watch Hill, R.I. And then there was their manner: group shots that froze ostensibly casual activity in ways that emphatically declared they were not snapshots. The photos had a suspended quality that suggested allegory, or maybe court paintings of the 17th century. The career-surveying tina barney (Rizzoli, $100) lays out her themes: bodies occupying space, bodies and their possessions. Even when her subjects are dwarfed by their tapestries, their furniture, their throw pillows, their sweeping vistas, there is never any ambiguity about the relationship. Her pictures are, overwhelmingly, about dominion, although she extends that to subjects lower down the economic ladder; those survey their livestock, their dirt bikes, their goth outfits. Barney seems less like a court painter from the 17 th century than one from the 18th: Sir Joshua Reynolds, perhaps. New York City's modeling career has been extensive, possibly foremost among the cities of the world, and the wonder is that it has been able to present a new face to almost every one of its portraitists. Todd Webb was maybe not the most original of the city's photographers, since in many ways his work looks like a continuation of Berenice Abbott's "Changing New York" project of the 1930s, but even more than hers, his pictures present a vividly comestible pedestrian-eye view, one that invites you to walk into that pawnshop, take a seat on that streetcar. I see a city: Todd Webb's New York (Thames & Hudson, $45), written by Sean Corcoran and Daniel Okrent and edited by Betsy Evans Hunt, shows an upbeat, down-market post-World War II Manhattan, filled with sidewalk vendors and one-story sheds and hand-painted signs. His main points of reference are Third Avenue (then shadowed by the el train), 125th Street and the East Side waterfront, which all still look like the 19th-century city, updated only slightly. His single most famous work is a panorama of one block, Sixth Avenue between 43rd and 44th Streets, assembled from eight separate frames, showing an easygoing, gently flyblown landscape of bars and juice and burger stands, secondhand-record stores, an artists' supply, a pool hall. It seems as if all you have to do is cross the avenue to melt into the thin Sunday crowd of browsers and idlers. But that attitude is gone along with its setting, replaced by glass and steel. The city chronicled by Weegee (Arthur Feliig) chronologically overlaps with Abbott's and Webb's, although his is the aspect of the city that made the ne ws: murders, fires, car crashes, floods, along with a few leisure activities. New York is depicted more often than not at night, its citizens at emotional extremes, its tenements and storefronts often disfigured by violence of one sort or another. You get the whole package - which also includes puppies and kittens, charity balls, wartime curfews and meat rationing - in Daniel Blau's EXTRA! WEEGEE (Hirmer/University of Chicago, $55), which presents 359 images, presumably the entirety of the work by Weegee found in the files of the parent company of Acme Newspictures, his longtime syndicate. I'm guessing that the editorial labor that went into the book consisted primarily of herding the pictures into subject categories, since no selection on the basis of quality appears to have been made. All of them were sent around to newspapers, as evidenced by the caption slugs reproduced alongside, and they all had some news value at the time, but far too many are second- or even third-rate as photographs, and much of the news is deservedly forgotten. Some of Weegee's greatest pictures are all but lost in the profusion of unmemorable everyday mayhem. This one is strictly for institutions and completists. Edward Grazda, working in the 1970s and early '80s, depicts a more chaotic city than Weegee's, and Grazda wasn't even looking for lurid subjects to feed the tabloids. MEAN STREETS: NYC 1970-1985 (powerHouse, $35) derives from his having lived for decades on Bleecker Street, at the northern end of Little Italy and steps away from the Bowery, the neighborhoods that loom largest in the book. It presents a reminder of just how many people seemed to live in cars then - and the cars were certainly big enough - while others made do with park benches, or failing that the sidewalk, perhaps with head inserted into a box for privacy. Certainly a great many people lived on the street even if they weren't sleeping there - the prostitutes who lined Broadway in Midtown, the three-card-monte operators on the edge of the sidewalk, the vague knots of guys who hung around outside bars or bodegas or freight entrances. Grazda's pearly black-and-white finish preserves the raggedy, stuporous air of the time with great dignity and pays its occasional menace the proper respect. Perhaps the most menacing image shows the Christmas window display at the Ravenite Social Club, of John Gotti fame: white silhouettes of Santa Claus and Frosty the Snowman against a black background, like outlines of corpses on the street. People continue to live on the streets even if we are not as aware of the fact now, as Khalik Allah shows in souls against the CONCRETE (University of Texas, $50). In 2011, Allah began taking his camera at night to the corner of 125th Street and Lexington Avenue, a drug spot for more than half a century, and established a regular post there. When he got to the point where the regulars trusted him and he could take pictures of people by simply asking, he also realized his method: color film and available light - from streetlights, store windows, cop cars. The combination makes faces appear especially vivid, emerging from the darkness like ships at sea. Many of the faces belong to ravaged smokers of K2, a treacherous marijuana substitute that remains legal in New York State and is sold nearby, but Allah also takes in people who are just walking to the subway station. The result is a panorama of human emotion: sadness, passion, bewilderment, pride, suspicion, amusement, exhaustion - all the faces of the night. "Time is over, and the world has ended," Allah writes. "Only the Light continues." William Gedney, who died of AIDS in 1989 after a 30-year photographic career mostly spent under the radar, also had a tendency to post himself in locations to observe: his grandparents' upstate farm, the el stop across from his apartment in Brooklyn, the home of a coal miner's family in eastern Kentucky, hippie crash pads in San Francisco, the alleys and courtyards of Benares and Calcutta, India. Gedney, in addition to being a deeply closeted gay man for most of his life, was also an unhappy lifelong isolate who connected to the world primarily through his lens. But his images certainly do connect; they are tender, searching, hugely understanding of even the most chaotic or circumscribed existences. WILLIAM GEDNEY: Only the Lonely, 19551984 (University of Texas, $40), by Gilles Mora, Margaret Sartor and Lisa McCarty, depicts a photographer emerging from the grand American documentary tradition (much of his early work looks like a direct homage to Walker Evans) and gradually finding his own identity, as well as a meticulous craftsman and record-keeper who planned 14 books of his photographs and made mockups of seven of them - none of them published. Even as his pictures can be joyful, it is impossible not to feel deep sadness for this man who had so much love to give and apparently received so little. Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb are a married couple of photographers (friends since 1988, married since 1999) who have pursued separate careers - six books for her, 16 for him - although, inevitably, they have affected each other's perspectives. SLANT RHYMES (La Fabrica, $45) IS their attempt to chart some of these cross-influences, although, as the titular allusion to Emily Dickinson suggests, in a decidedly nonliteral way. Every spread contrasts a picture apiece by each of them, and the connections between them are mostly delicate and elusive - a hue, a texture, an incidental structural effect, now and then an object. She is more attuned to the natural world, he to the vagaries of human existence; both of them are intoxicated by color and enjoy making layered compositions in which the eye flits from close up to far back. By the end of this modest but exquisite book, even viewers unfamiliar with either of the Webbs will have a pretty good idea of their individual strengths and tendencies as well as of, as it were, their house style. STEPHEN SHORE: Selected Works 1973-1981 (Aperture, $80) hands the selection over to 16 people - photographers like An-?? Lé and Thomas Struth, writers including Francine Prose and Lynne Tillman, the artist Ed Ruscha, the film director Wes Anderson, as well as Shore himself - tasked with choosing from among the lesserknown, mostly unpublished images in Shore's "Uncommon Places" archive. (Disclosure : Shore is a friend and my colleague at Bard College.) "Uncommon Places" is Shore's extensive road-trip project - perhaps the ultimate photographic road-trip project, taking in most of the lower 48 (with the occasional glimpse of Europe) over eight years, employing a 4-by-5 view camera and then an 8-by-10 to document what can now be seen as the old, layered and improvised, pre-corporate America. Each of the selectors has a particular approach: Lé focuses on women, the photo historian Michael Lesy on cars, Shore on his uncommon vertical compositions, many of the other photographers on pictures they might have taken themselves. The result feels not at all like a collection of B-sides and outtakes but rather another volume of Shore's apparently inexhaustible supply of immersive images, an archive that keeps on giving. LUC SANTE'S most recent book is "The Other Paris." He teaches the history of photography at Bard.
Choice Review
Including extraordinary reproductions and far-ranging essays by seven contributors of varied backgrounds, this catalogue of an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art provides a welcome overview of Penn (1917-2009) and his vast photographic work. Though the treatment is not biographical, the book proceeds chronologically, and highlights of significant aspects of Penn's life and production provide an excellent sense of the man behind the camera. Recurring references to Penn's feelings about fashion versus his feelings about portraiture and still life are revelatory. As Philippe Garner writes in his essay, "In Vogue, 1947-50," "Penn was the first to admit that fashion, in itself, was of little importance to him." In the first essay, "The Heart of the Matter," Hambourg observes that though Penn worked for Vogue for seven decades, he was "not a Vogue type." Penn was influenced by, and associated with, Alexey Brodovitch and Alexander Liberman; both are referenced, as is his friend Richard Avedon. Other important influences--positive (Walker Evans) and negative (Diana Vreeland)--are revealed. Penn was a master of many photographic processes and manipulations, and he spent many hours in the darkroom. He was a private, quiet introvert, and that is reflected in his work. End-of-book material, e.g., a chronology, adds much important detail. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All readers. --Carl Chiarenza, University of Rochester
Library Journal Review
There is no dearth of books about the life and art of Irving Penn (1917-2009). WorldCat catalog shows almost 100 titles by or about the remarkable mid-20th-century fashion photographer and portraitist. This major retrospective catalog, accompanying the exhibition of the same name at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, including more than 200 plates, is stunning. Penn's career spanned the 1940s through the first decade of the 21st century, during which he produced sophisticated fashion photography, impressions of celebrities and cultural icons, and still life studies. Standouts include his portraits of the peoples of Peru, Benin, New Guinea, and Morocco, images that suggest ethnographic studies are actually elegant fashion photos. His images of zaftig female nudes anticipated the body positive movement, but were too outré for 1950 when they were made. VERDICT With hundreds of photographs from every phase of Penn's career, together with informative essays on his life and work by Hambourg and other Met curators, this title's quality of the printing does justice to the superb caliber of Penn's originals. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
