IN EVERY PHOTO A HEARTACHE
Everything seen through photographer Irving Penn’s
eye possesses a hard, polished gloss: still-lifes (of cuts of meats, cigarette
butts, naked women), fashion shots (of
Dovima, Carmen, Giselle), and portraits (of Truman
Capote, Carson McCullers, Ingmar Bergman). Penn’s restrospective at The Met, Irving Penn: Centennial, is packed with beauty. At the same time it reveals the kind of beauty these pictures possess - a stilled compositional perfection - leaves something wanting.
Penn did most of
his work for fashion magazines, whose task it is to produce distilled, telegraphic, fantasies about clothes. These photos are often remarkably straightforward, showing a single mannequin posing in front of a building, a sleeve ballooning like a melon around a slender arm, a hooded face set against a blank backdrop.
These images don’t require contemplation. They are not about character, story, or even clothing; they are instantaneously-appraised emblems of elegance.
But Penn’s still-lives, also commissioned for fashion magazines, often carry rich, complex narratives. One, Theatre Accident, New York, shows a gold clutch that’s been dropped at a woman’s feet, its contents spilling out across the carpet: opera glasses, pen, pocket watch, cigarette lighter, hairpin, earring, room key. Thought we see no more of this woman than her stockinged foot in a patent leather flat, we know all about her: her simple but rigorous toilette, her dark cluttered Manhattan apartment, her stable of gentleman friends. We also know that, tonight, she’s alone, she’s running late, she forgot to drop her lipstick in her purse, she lost her other earring in the cab. The composition is suggestive, it beckons; the objects roll off the bottom off the page into the world.
There’s only one fashion photograph in the show that supports this kind of narrative,
Man Lighting Girl’s Cigarette (Jean Patchett).
Here a chicly-attired young woman – seen in profile – sits beside a glass of red wine, holding out her
cigarette to a man – seen only as a tuxedoed arm – to light for her. This scene is witnessed from a distance, through a half-empty wine bottle that’s tilting precariously in the foreground. The scenario sets off a string of
questions: Has this young woman had too much to drink? Will she leave the room with this man? Will the other man, the man who opened
the bottle for her, reappear? It’s these stories, in the end, that sear the image in the heart. Its formal beauty is, simply, appraised, and forgotten.