This group of black and white portraits by Irving Penn, purchased in 2007, is this museum’s first acquisition of photographs. Inside the International Style piazza they seem comfortably at home even though they represent a very different area of collecting for the Morgan. Despite photography having been accorded the status of fine art for many years it still only receives token acknowledgement in museums. In these photographs there is great attention to composition, lighting, sharpness of image, and tonal values. These are beautiful, flawless prints. By not elucidating any of this with its first photographic exhibition, the Morgan has missed the perfect opportunity to expand the understanding of the discipline and of its audience.
Most of them were made for Vogue. Because the subjects are famous artists of the mid to late 20th Century, because we can assume that they lead busy lives and that their time was valuable, we are left to infer that these works are important because the subjects considered the photographer to have been a famous artist and person as well.
When we are introduced to a person, or in conversation with another, we make eye contact. When we see a portrait, whether painted or photographed, we immediately make eye contact as well in order to ascertain the character of the person depicted. In viewing portraits this human response can cause us to judge the works by that character as we interpret it, while overlooking them as artworks: it is only when the subject’s eyes are not seen that we can more easily see the whole of the design and the artistry within the format.
I would suspect that Irving Penn agreed with that. It might explain why, once he had placed his subjects in front of his camera, he then waited a good long time before tripping the shutter.
In many of these photographs the subjects have not only relaxed, they have grown weary of the experience. The only thing that seems to keep them in place is their commitment to being photographed. Many of them seem perplexed and to regret that they have agreed to the project. In each of them there is the stillness of the studio in which they were made. Throughout almost all of these portraits there is an almost palpable sense of tedium. When considering: “What is expressed”, that pervasive sense of tedium is found to be stronger than the character of the persons portrayed. It is enhanced by the consistently bland and gray environments. Thus Penn has succeeded in making unusual and disturbing images of persons that overcome the propensity for eye contact. These are not portraits but Photographs Made by Irving Penn in the same way that Picasso’s pen and ink drawing is a drawing by Picasso rather than a portrait of Stravinski.
Each of these persons, as a successful artist, has for the readers of Vogue a recognizable persona. Not everyone with a recognizable public image wants to reveal much more of himself beyond that. By allowing them to just stand there many of them have let go of some degree of that persona: Georgia O’Keefe who, let us not forget, has posed for Stieglitz, seems more impatient and cranky than one might have suspected she could be.
But this is not always the case: Saul Steinberg, seen looking into the camera, into our eyes, is drawing a self portrait and seems absolutely intent on delighting in his artist’s persona every waking moment of his day.
In a double portrait Fredrick Kiesler has grown bored and has bowed his head and turned inwardly to his own thoughts while his companion, William de Kooning, continues to hold his pose with such professionalism and respect that the long ash on his cigarette does not fall. This photograph is initially amusing and disturbing and then, ultimately, neither…there is not enough here to sustain the viewer’s interest. In the brochure the Morgan directs our attention to the cuffs of the shirt sleeves and to a cuff link: my point precisely.
In the photographs in which the subject looks away from the camera the personality of the subject is of no interest to the photographer at all. In an extreme close up Somerset Maugham’s face looks like old meat. It evokes a very visceral response in the viewer. But this seems not so much the concept of the found photograph as purposeful: in the portrait of Louise Bourgeoise the subject is her dry, wrinkled, heavily textured old skin. Only by having placed the light just so could that texture have been emphasized on film.
In that photograph other aspects of Penn’s method become evident. The extreme black of her shoulder, toward the camera, seems not to result from the light having been flagged off the subject in the studio but from manipulation, burning in, in the printing. In the portrait of Phillip Roth in which his neck rises out of his turned up collar, one realizes that his shoulders, which should be seen, are not and a closer examination of the print indicates that they have been blurred into the ground. Whether this was done to the negative, during printing, or to the print I would not know, but it enhances the awareness that in the studio and in the dark room Penn was a man much given to manipulation and control. As those are generally not admirable human qualities, that awareness adds a rather cold and dark layer to these works.
Exploring this aspect of the work one begins to realize that almost all of these photographs lack spontaneity. This is not a photographer who would capture a moment within a movement such as a Frenchman leaping over a puddle. Many are overworked to the point of being contrived. Because contrivance is so deadly and antithetical to art, one begins to question Penn’s technique. Is the too obvious manipulation a stylistic device meant to be seen or is it an excess of which he is unaware? Has the photographer placed himself front and center, as in those works by other artists bearing the title: The Artist and His Model, or has he assumed the central position through the expression of his own egoism?
Jasper Johns is the only subject to appear in two photographs. In the first, 1964, he is a rather bland young man newly arrived to fame. In the second, 2006, he is The Picture of Dorian Gray. While that could be read as the photographer’s interpretation of the subject’s character and life experience, because the composition is so rigid and the lighting so unusual and so controlled, it reads rather as the photographer using the subject in order to make a photograph that defines his stylistic approach in disregard of the subject’s personality. Why then use a person who has name recognition?
In others the camera is so close it distorts the shape of the head. This was not done to better depict the personality of that person but only for the purpose of making a striking image: anyone could have been the subject of those photographs. That the subject and the photographer were celebrities gives the works an importance, to the readers of Vogue, that they would not have if both persons were unknown.
As one of the house organs for the social set, Vogue had a status amongst the initiates that was not shared by those outside that world. To an outsider the world of Vogue was a hybrid world, a world which placed much importance on being seen, in what, and with whom. To the outsider these Vogue photographs would seem to be hybrids without universal significance. Admitting their possibly limited appeal, one questions the status of the photographer: whereas his images seemingly minimize the celebrity status of his subjects, in the end these photographs, made for Vogue, can be seen to have come into existence only because of the celebrity status of all concerned. The shift from portraiture to enigmatic image is only an editorial, stylistic device that establishes that equality.
Considered all together these photographs can be understood as a group portrait of a social class. This world seems cold and uninviting; celebrity is presented as a tedious, trivial, and unenviable attainment. Was that the intention? Were the sitters in agreement with that or has their confidence been betrayed? In many of them I feel it is the latter. It is because of that perceived disrespect that I find these photographs disturbing.
http://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/penn.asp
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