Photography resonates with a larger audience than any other modern artistic medium. The price of this art nowadays is the cost of a disposable camera, which explains why so many people, whether they have artistic intentions or not, have jumped on board.
Irving Penn chose to invest his dime and his artistic inclinations in platinum printing, an ancestor of modern photography, in his recent donation of 85 prints to the National Gallery of Art.
Platinum printing was wildly popular from the turn of the century until World War II, when obtaining platinum in the U.S. became difficult. The printmaking process is time-consuming, but Penn’s prints are well worth his efforts. The prints at the National Gallery are so intricate that the picks in the cloth of many of Penn’s backdrops are as clear as his subject matter. The oversized pores and sunspots on his subjects’ faces in the Portraits section of the exhibit are refreshingly real.
One of his most famous portraits, of Picasso in Cannes, draws your eye immediately upon entering the exhibit. In a quote on the wall next to the portrait, Penn notes that while photographing Picasso, he realized that the artist fixated on his own reflection in the camera lens, and he manages to capture Picasso’s narcissistic attitude perfectly.
In his portrait of sculptor David Smith, Penn’s eye for the nitty-gritty of day to day living and working is apparent. He captures Smith’s deformed thumbnail, bruised and cracked from his work. In another portrait of Willem de Kooning and Frederick Kiesler, Penn emphasizes the space between each man’s cuff and the rest of their shirts, where their freckled forearms show. The photograph is sweet somehow, and one cannot help but sense the emotion and distant admiration in both Penn and his subjects.
Penn is most well-known for his fashion photography for magazines like Vogue, and many of these prints are also on display. His wife, a model, poses for many of them, while others are merely photographs of mannequins in stylish clothing, which are more interesting in their exposure of the hook on a mannequins head, or the plastic sheen of their skin. The platinum printing heightens the light and dark contrasts for an exquisite display of both.
The photographs he took in a Victorian-esque studio in Cuzco, Peru in 1948 are the most fascinating, especially one entitled “Cuzco Children” in which two Incan children pose holding one another’s hands across a small stool. The look on their faces is bizarre and strained, and their clasped hands seem unnatural. Penn is quoted as saying that he always chose one pose, and stuck to it in order to really dig deep into the person. This was a way of letting the person become comfortable in front of the camera, letting them adjust to what might be unnatural for them, and then to his presence. This sensitivity, along with the beauty of the platinum printing, are what really make this exhibit, and Penn himself, something special.
The exhibit will be on display at the National Gallery until Oct. 2.
