Irving Penn: Kinship – 4 -Colors

The exhibition localizes the echo visual scheme, opened in the seventy -year career of the photographer.

Irving Penn: KinshipView of the installation. With the kind assistance gallery. In the photo, in the center, on the right wall: Cigarette No. 171972 Two Miyake Warriors (B)1998.

Irving Penn: Kinshipcurated by Hank Willis Thomas, Pace Gallery, 508 Twenty -fifth street, New York, until February 22, 2025

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There is an anomalous image among the forty -three photos of Irving Penn, which concept artist Hank Willis Thomas has also chosen an array on Peace New York. Rabat (1951) is a picture of a narrow alley closed by a series of slightly pointed arches. Woman and children move on it when blurring. One of the children, the most common, seems to be running. It is by no means strange to find Pen’s camera in an atmosphere away from his perch at his Vogue (where he worked for more than sixty years, until his death in 2009). The magazine sent him to Lima for a fashion photo in 1948; He remained and sought the remote, mountain city of Cusco, photographing his locals. Between 1967 and 1971, Penn moved to numerous destinations: Dahomey (present -day Benin), New Guinea and Morocco. (The fruits of these excursions first appeared in Vogue and have been drawn up in the 1974 book. Worlds in a small room.) What is unusual is not to find the photographer outside New York, but to find it from the doors. Pen was the creature of the studio, placing the topics against murals, controlling the flow of light and carefully printing its images to make the most expressive range of the gray cliff of photography, from Stark White to Velvet Black and all the tones between them. When he was traveling, he hired studios or created improvised ones, capturing people with a variety of cultures in exactly the same way he filmed models that wear high fashion. In both cases, there was no blurry. In the studio everything was sharp, pristine and under the competence of the photographer.

Erving Penn, Rabat1951 with kindness Pace Gallery. © Irving Penn Foundation.

The studio becomes not only a background but also a support in his “angular portraits”, began in 1948, which presents the luminaries of the day – from Georgia O’Kif to Truman Capote to Joe Louis. The photographer has a sneaky subject between two gray walls on scenes that met at a sharp angle InS By negotiating this spatial restriction, sometimes with the help of a chair, they stood stiff, nervously curled up, scattered confrontation, and otherwise revealed themselves to the lens of Pen. Thomas revealed the pace gallery on the fifth floor into a series of gray corner walls, emitting out of central star shape. The corners abound. The artist playfully showed “angular portraits” in some. But this is not the kind of doubling with which Thomas is most concerned. Entitled Irving Penn: KinshipThe central goal of his show is to identify the visual scheme and compositional themes that echo in the long arc of the photographer’s career.

Irving Penn: KinshipView of the installation. With the kind assistance gallery. In the photo, far left: Single oriental poppy (s)1968 Second to left on the left: Three Dahomey Girls (with Buy)1967.

The colored lipstick pieces in a 1982 commercial image are arranged to a similar effect as New York Artists in a group portrait of 1947 for Vogue; They also rhyme with the pieces of wood in the still life Arrangement of 15 Pieces (1980). Coat of designer Edward Moline, captured in 1950, blown and curves like the naked torso of dancer Alexandra Beller (1999) and the brother vertical figures in Two Miyake warriors (1998) Examine a pair of monumental cigarettes since 1972, given the specific scope of Pen’s work, official affinities can make for strange beds, those that connect the center and the periphery, and something. For example, we rediscover the upcoming night of a young girl named Juliet Aucclos (1949) in the curved hat of the Engine tribes (1970) and find the abyss that subdivine the assembly of the hellish angels of 1967 again at the collection of six members of the tribe Asaro in New Guinea, shot dead in 1970. It is most strongly that three girls from Dahomey, Wearing bowls on their heads (1967) resemble a secret resemblance to the three stems and stigma of the flower – Oriental Mak, filmed in 1968.

Irving Penn: KinshipView of the installation. With the kind assistance gallery. In the photo from left to right, left and central walls: Building1979; Lipstick1982; New York Artists1947; Arrangement of 15 pieces1980.

In his curatorial statement, Thomas talks about a “visual memory”, which revives Pen’s seventy-year career, which he liken to the muscle memory, the opposite of the photographer, suggests, creates, and then repeats certain formal schemes over time. Since most of the groups are grown contains only two photos, these echoes are always likely to be one -off. I suspected that I was leaving the show. Explore the threshold of the Metropolitan Museum of Art Museum of Metropolitan Erving Penn: CentennialAlthough it emphasizes Thomas’s thesis. In it, the motive of “threes” appears again and again; “Suspected group” is everywhere. Challenging the idea that the artist’s work is developing in a linear way, Thomas presents instead the movement of the cycle that he walks again on himself, “as if [Penn’s] Creative impulses were remnants of a deeper, lasting vision. “One can also claim that through these multiple schemes, Pen organizes the world to meet his official parameters, having to reality as he finds it. The results are shiny – his images are both bold and nuanced, elegant and alive. Still, it’s hard not to feel the result of a control look. . And they belonged to me as objects for the moment of time.

Erving Penn, Cigarette No. 171972 with the kind Pace gallery. © Irving Penn Foundation.

Thomas praises the consistent achievement of Pen’s photographs “Regardless of the topic.” “It is as if every image,” he continues, “carries an echo from his broader artistic ethos: the belief that beauty and meaning can be found in the most amazing places. “Pen’s cigarettes come to mind, along with the question: Pen” finds “the beauty that is presented in them, or penetrates them, or at least with greatness that raises its low subjects into something worthy of our attitude? These are not just cigarettes sitting in an ashtray or on the sidewalk; They were presented on a series of art maneuvers: selected for their symmetry, they were shot against ordinary, white land and increased approximately twenty times the bigger than their actual size. Through these steps, Pen pursues cigarette asses from the kingdom of use. There is no way to approach them except the level of shape and there is no way to understand them except as aesthetic objects. In this case, this is a beautiful transformation; But what of the three Dahomey girls, eradicated by the same process by their independent existence outside Pen’s studio. It is this aesthetization that brings them to the fact that they are in some sense, equivalent to a three -headed flower. In other words, a product of Pen’s vision.

Margaret Sudel is the editor -in -chief of 4 columnsS