Twenty years ago it was natural to ask: What are Irving Penn’s photographs doing on the walls of a gallery?
Until then, virtually all his pictures were conceived, taken and printed for reproduction in Vogue, where he became known as one of the world’s most famous fashion and portrait photographers. But in the 1970s that emphasized Penn’s links to commerce and high society rather than to art, so he had to make a dramatic leap from the printed page if his appearance in galleries was to be seen as something more than entering the marketplace at the height of popular interest in photography.
The prints that make up the small Penn exhibition opening Friday at the Ehlers Caudill Gallery were part of that leap, insofar as they re-imagined images intended to be held in the hand in terms of display on a wall.
The negatives for the images are from 1949 and 1950. Sometimes the prints came from more than 25 years later. But photographers often print from old negatives, preferring the later prints as the results of greater experience.
Penn’s early and later prints are, however, marked by more than small differences. By 1975 he already had begun experimenting with processes that yielded dramatically different tonal qualities from prints made on silver paper for reproduction.
Penn’s exhibition prints of earlier subjects are, then, translations into a completely different tonal language. They resemble the prints for Vogue only in regard to their fashion, portrait or still-life subjects. Everything else Penn has changed or elaborated.
Part of the essence of fashion photography is its isolation from the world of everyday appearances. Penn’s work pushed such isolation to an extreme. His subjects are completely cut off from anything resembling a natural setting. There’s only the coolly artificial environment of glamor or fame that provokes (but does not suggest) commerce.
Penn made his leap from magazine to gallery by isolating his images from their commercial purpose — no mean feat. He achieved it, however, through the age-old equation of elaborate handicraft with high aesthetics.
The images in the exhibition are the same images of fashion mannikins and tradesmen and personalities that appeared in Vogue. But the images have been enlarged, cropped, bleached, toned and printed so painstakingly that their original associations have faded.
These pictures are no longer “about” style or clothing or the character of famous sitters. Emphasis is now on the richness and exoticism of the printing, for some are so velvety and others so apparently scarred that in both cases we want to touch them.
Penn’s details of female nudes sometimes make us forget they represent anything at all and nearly become objects themselves, like sleek marble tablets with subtle discolorations and unexpected rough patches. They are beautiful not because they depict something we know from human experience. They’re beautiful because Penn’s exquisite handiwork has made them strange, isolated from experience.
When he presents a high-fashion woman as a silhouette with one hand that seems to plunge into still, airless space, it is not that illusion that attracts us but the scratches he has added to his negative that emphasize flatness and, again, his handiwork over the print’s subject.
Some have thought Penn’s series on tradesmen are his only photographs that are more relaxed and freer of his control. Of those on view, the one with flour dusting the clothes and shoes of the bakers indicates just the opposite, the gorgeous, inescapable tyranny of his artifice.
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At Ehlers Caudill Gallery, 750 N. Orleans St., through June 21.
