To mark the centenary of Irving Penn’s birth, The Metropolitan Museum of Art has open its doors in April to a major exhibition celebrating one of the foremost photographers of our time. With more than 200 prints on display (the majority a recent gift to the museum from The Irving Penn Foundation), the retrospective is the most substantial to date and explores every period in Penn’s prolific 70-year long career. From New York the exhibition will then travel internationally with a first stop at the Grand Palais in Paris in September.
The publication of the accompanying book Irving Penn: Centennial is an occasion in itself. Not only does it feature the largest selection of Penn photographs ever compiled, including works that have never been published, it also provides essays with a fresh intellectual understanding of the deeply private artist and the human being behind the masterful photographs. The book and exhibition are created and co-organized by Maria Morris Hambourg, who founded the Met’s Department of Photographs in 1992 and knew Penn personally, and Jeff L. Rosenheim, the department’s current Curator in Charge.
The two curators were asked to select three images each from the exhibition and reflect upon them with Luncheon magazine’s editor in chief and creative director Thomas Persson. The interviews here provide fascinating insight into the artistic creation and circumstances in which these photographs were made. From Marlene Dietrich to a tribesman in New Guinea; a female nude and a still life for Vogue; a fishmonger in London and two cigarette butts – Penn’s wide-ranging subjects were all part of his worldly narrative and, as they are observed within these pages, his profound talent for storytelling.
Today, we present the third part of this series with words on Nude No. 72, New York, 1949-50.
Thomas Persson: This photograph is selected from the Nudes series, which was really the first personal project for Penn when he starts to experiment profoundly with his subject and with printing techniques. How did the series come about?
Maria Morris Hambourg: It was the summer of 1949; Liberman and the other editors had left for Europe and Penn thought, this is my moment; instead of taking a vacation I will do a series of nudes. Nobody was around. What’s more, he had a dedicated studio, so there was nobody coming or going. It was just him, the camera, and the model. He put the camera on a tiny tripod on the floor and would direct the model, “What do you think would happen if you took a deep breath and raised your left arm?” or “What might happen if you rolled to your left and threw your head back?” and he would just see what evolved. He was watching the forms unfold in the camera; he wasn’t trying to pose the model to match some preordained or conventional idea of what a nude should look like. The pictures resulted from the discovery of what was actually happening in front of the camera. As he worked and the forms kept evolving, these unforeseen visions would call forth more new ways of seeing the female body.
Thomas Persson: The women in the photographs are often fleshier, more voluptuous than the fashion models he shot for Vogue. Do you think that this project was a liberating antidote to the very slim and stylized female form he was used to shoot for his fashion pictures?
Maria Morris Hambourg: Yes, in Penn’s work you will see a wave formation: First the Vogue version and then his relief from the Vogue life and world. He began by photographing some of the models he had worked with, but then he found artists’ models who were used to working without clothes, who had larger, fleshier breasts, bellies and thighs. These larger volumes made more interesting pictures. I spent some time at the Art Institute of Chicago looking at the negatives of this series trying to understand which pictures came first and which were the last. That was how we know the evolution was from the slimmer models to larger, more ample women. It was fascinating to see, picture by picture, how he proceeded; it became clear to me then that he was working through the camera. As he explained to me, in this slow-motion ballet he had to keep the model’s attention 100 percent, all the time while working with her; so he would talk to her, in his encouraging, positive low voice, continually, even without words, with sort of animal murmurings, to create a supportive atmosphere, and to keep her with him. He said, “I couldn’t let her wander at all, not even in her mind.”
Thomas Persson: And for the printing process he hired a new assistant especially for this, Robert Freson.
Maria Morris Hambourg: Yes, a charming and talented man. Freson had a very good
Swiss education in techniques. Penn wanted to reduce the actuality of the model, to allow her physicality to come through without the documentary report. They tried out a silver printing process where they would so overexpose the print it went black. They would lose the image! And then they would bleach it back. The bleaching process was completely unruly; they couldn’t control it. The two of them never knew exactly what was going to emerge. Freson said that they might print a hundred sheets to get five or even just one print that Penn judged worthy of his intention. If you look at two or three prints together from the same negative, they can be entirely different. Sometimes chance would produce something they did not expect but was marvelous! Penn said that printing those stupendous negatives was mesmerizing. How would they end up manifesting themselves? It was as if the prints themselves were in control, almost alive. He told me he wanted to go on and on printing until “something absolutely godly would happen.” It was an extremely intense moment in his art and I think it was the first when he fully realized the complete extension of his possibilities as printmaker and photographer, together.
Thomas Persson: The photographs were not well received by Alexander Liberman and Edward Steichen, two of the most important arbiters of photography at the time. They completely dismissed them, as far as I understand?
Maria Morris Hambourg: Yes, and that’s interesting, but it makes sense. Liberman was very clear about photography not being an art. For him it was a form of communication and it should be readable. So the unusual, selective printing was unacceptable. Another problem was, as Penn put it, the “vegetation.” It was illegal to publish an image showing pubic hair. Both men were dismissive, so Penn put all those wonderful prints back in the box and started doing other things. It wasn’t the moment for that kind of open creativity in photography to be celebrated, especially in the nude. The combination of abundant flesh, the unseemly print process and the “vegetation”— it was just too much.
Thomas Persson: Do you think Penn was disappointed that they didn’t recognize the greatness of these photographs at the time?
Maria Morris Hambourg: I can’t imagine that he wasn’t a little disappointed. But he was pretty clear about how great they were. He knew. He didn’t destroy them. And he included some them in the Marlborough gallery exhibits in New York and London at a moment when the world had finally caught up to the fact that photography was an art. They were a critical part of his understanding of his life’s work. When I talked to him about an exhibition, he said, “I’d love to show them because for me it was the most important artistic moment.”
Thomas Persson is the editor in chief and creative director of Luncheon. Maria Morris Hambourg is the founding curator of the Department of Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York.
Irving Penn : Centennial
April 24 to July 30, 2017
The Met, Gallery 199
1000 5th Ave
New York, NY 10028
USA
