Irving Penn: Photographs From the Years 1949 and 1950
By Fred Camper
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The ten photographs at Ehlers Caudill are mostly newer prints of photographs originally commissioned from Penn for Vogue. Born in New Jersey in 1917, he was a graphic and advertising designer in New York in the late 1930s. After a year of painting in Mexico in 1942, he began his career in magazine photography, which continued for decades; in the 1970s he also began exhibiting in galleries, both photos from new negatives and magazine negatives reprinted. Frequently he changed the process when reprinting to produce a work worthy of contemplation in itself rather than–in his words–“a halfway house on the way to the page.” And his prints mostly heighten a central quality of fashion photography: carefully worked textures, often the result of photochemical manipulations, attract the viewer with an allover sensuality.
Alexander Liberman, the art director at Vogue and Penn’s longtime employer, once wrote of Penn’s “American instincts” and “pioneer spirit,” and there is a sense of wonder in many of these pictures. Perhaps looking and display are Penn’s ways of discovering the world. But these perfectly composed images are very far from candid shots. Penn once wrote of a favorite model that “her expression builds until she and the camera come alive together,” and this is the goal–extended from facial expression to the whole figure–of all ten pictures in this show.
Of course one reason that everything in these photos seems to be receding is that the photographers could seldom place themselves in the thick of the action without being arrested; the photographers depicted their status as prisoners in their own country through these hidden views. Of four photos by Ed van Wijk mounted together, three show Germans searching the streets for civilians to arrest, and one reveals someone in hiding. In one of the street scenes a window ledge obscures a third of the frame, becoming a barrier to seeing the tiny figures in the street below. Images taken in the street often have a similar distance, as in another photo by Breijer. Taken from just above waist level, a position dictated by the camera’s concealment in a box, it shows one man selling flowers to another with a German officer in the background looking on. The camera is too distant from the action to be involving and not distant enough to give a whole cityscape, creating an almost random view except for the way the German is perfectly framed between the other two figures, asserting power over the scene.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Photos by Irving Penn and Charles Breijer.
