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Two aspects of photography: Irving Penn and Louise Lawler

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 Two Aspects/Molesworth

Two Aspects of Photography:

Irving Penn and Louise Lawler

Two recent exhibitions highlighted the remarkable talents of two very

different photographers, Irving Penn and Louise Lawler.1 Together (and

singly) they have produced works of extensive variety that are based on a

range of assumptions, assumptions about subject matter, technical skill,

audience reception and the larger socio-cultural web of meanings and

associations. Yet most worthy of reflection is how much they differ about

the things that really matter.

The Penn exhibition draws on his career-long and varied range of artful

photographs, though including most famously his work as a fashion

photographer for Vogue magazine, where it could be said he redefined that

genre. With fashion photography as the art form posing the question, it is

often the subject matter and our approach to it that make up the answer.

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What and how is the photographer trying to make us see? What is the

singular focus? For Penn the first tentative answer is the surface of theatrical

self-presentation, the body visually enwrapped as the support in and through

the garment and the pose. In short, fashion photography. For Lawler the

hovering answer is the frame and the way it holds the object and its optic

values in its social grasp. Both photographers want us to see what is there,

but to see their subjects as being posed (Penn) or held (Lawler) in such a

way as to reveal their truer impress, their otherwise fugitive aspects. For

Penn it is the gaze, even the stare, while for Lawler it is the format of

meaning and the shapes of regard.

* * * * *

Penn became so famous as the photographer at Vogue that it’s hardly a

stretch to dub him the inventor of fashion photography. In a less fame-

making way, Lawler has utilized some of the assumptions of art theory and a

canny sense of visual semantics to become a leading master of feminist and

conceptualist picture-making. (Please allow the masculine category for the

moment.) Innovations from both artists include using photographs as the

central medium of their work while also branching out beyond their

signature styles. Penn once resorted to nudes, to commonplace subjects

(such as his stunning shots of cigarette butts), ethnographic studies and still-

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lifes. In every case the stress is on polish and chic. One critic has invoked

Walter Benjamin and his model of the flaneur, who wanders through the

modern city estheticizing everything he sees: “This idle stroller is adrift in

the city, his passive senses exquisitely attuned. His greatest luxury is to have

no purpose. Like the photographer and his subjects, he is a solitary figure.”2

In the case of one of Penn’s most famous photos, his wife holds her

head in such a way to justify the gown she’s wearing. The photograph –

“Rochas mermaid dress (modeled by Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn),” Paris, 1950.

Platinum-palladium print, 1980 – is in the expensive but beautiful medium

of platinum prints that Penn helped revitalize. One might recall the scientific

claim that the human eye can distinguish among 16,000 different shades;

here it’s on restricted but rewarding display, as black, white and the greys

between them are shown in their fullest range. A similar photograph (“The

Twelve Most Photographed Models, New York,” 1947. Gelatin silver print.)

shows a dozen versions of the Fonssagrives. It was in fact at the shoot for

this elaborate display that Penn met Fonssagrives, who soon became his

wife. The memories in the photograph register a real love story and a

symbolic forecast of the post-war richness that would soon bring America to

its position as a super power. Of course it’s easy to over-read a work like

this after it’s become iconic. Still, the Penn technique of not using props or

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settings in his fashion shots suggests a kind of insouciance and plentitude

that would characterize American values for the next two decades. Penn and

Vogue worked together at the center of a cultural moment that became the

equal of Paris in the ‘twenties. The models and celebrities that merited a

Penn portrait were part of a system of the production and consumption of a

new form of wealth and ostentation.

A reprise of sorts to the shot of the dozen models takes place when

Penn used his wife as a single model in his “Woman in Chicken Hat” (Lisa

Fonssagrives-Penn), 1949, an outrageously chic image where the black and

white of the chicken’s feathers caress the right check and shoulder of

Fonssagrives as the lady regards us with an over-the-shoulder glance

perfectly suspended between a disdain so mild as almost not to register and a

deft blankness that has no tale urgently worth telling. Part of the recurring

pleasure of looking at Penn’s most typical fashion portraits is calculating just

how much of the attendant psychology is on offer. Are the women real, in

any fixed sense of the term? Or do they hang around like pictures of

themselves? But this particular staged image summarizes Penn’s achieved

style, giving him the signature that his peers – like Henri Cartier-Bresson

and Walker Evans and Berenice Abbott – achieved in natural settings rather

than elaborately arranged shoots.

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Take another moment and consider “Black and White Fashion with

Handbag (Jean Patchett), New York,” 1950, printed April 2003, as

assortments of high fashion objects, hat, purse, and so forth, generate a sort

of mid-career Picasso where cubism has put aside its right angles in favor of

curves and slides that seek their own focal point. The handle of the purse and

the brim of the hat look like brush strokes in a cubist painting that has

decided to abandon straight lines. Meanwhile the model’s face is only

slightly visible, since her expression has been removed or surrendered to the

shielding curve of her elaborately brimmed hat.

Penn, like many master photographers, devoted time and effort to

representing the nude in all its art-history fullness, which meant on occasion

not idealizing or even eroticizing the subject. Here is a passage where

Anthony Lane, normally the movie reviewer for The New Yorker, wrestles

with his experience in 2002 of having recently seen Penn’s exhibit, “Earthly

Bodies.” Here, instead of the calm dispassionate poses of fashion

photography, Lane was faced with a collection of Penn’s nudes, which were

headless shots of reclining naked women whose appearance was made

striking by their plus size. Lane exercises rather elevated rhetoric to get his

points across. This exhibit could seem to be the antipode to a haute couture

fashion shoot.3  

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Looking at the show, I began to envisage Penn as a

quiet American cousin of the Catherine Deneuve

character in "Belle de Jour." She, blessed with a

husband who looks like a male model and behaves

like a perfect gent, seeks afternoon solace in the paws

of the misshapen and the voluminous, as if to

reassure herself, like Penn, that beauty is not always

truth, and that truth comes in different sizes.

This exhibit took place in 2002, but many of the nude portraits in it were

taken several years earlier. Violating the standards that have made fashion

models almost seem a species apart, Penn framed the shots so as to exclude

the head of the model, and showed bluntly her less than svelte curves. Only

one example had appeared in Vogue, the artiest of fashion magazines, and

most were kept out of the public eye. Lane goes on to supply the backstory

of the delayed exposure, so to speak.

Alexander Liberman [Penn’s editor at Vogue], whose

tastes were honorably catholic, smelled something

blasphemous in the pictures, and no more were

reproduced in the magazine. Even Edward Steichen,

then heading the Department of Photography at the

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Museum of Modern Art, was ruffled. He asked Penn

to contribute a selection of work to a forthcoming

symposium but added, conspiratorially, "None of

those nudes." Thus rebuffed, or simply

misunderstood, Penn chose not to exhibit more than a

few of them for thirty years.

Simply put, Penn often worked at the behest of others, and as such for many

he failed to stand out as the perfect modernist hero who defies conventions

for all of us. Liberman, in an interview with Martin Filler, once went so far

as to testify that “Penn has never had an original idea in his life, it all comes

from me. I always need to give him a sketch of exactly what I want because he

has no imagination.”4  This startling group of nudes, however, resulted from

Penn’s off-duty work, so to speak, for it wasn’t done on assignment from

Vogue or any other magazine; Penn was on his own. Had he gone too far,

and, cut lose from the generic limits he had himself defined, stood too alone?

Many have raised the question of how Penn and his art are beholden to

the world of capitalist hegemony and the values of conspicuous

consumption. No one needs to read Thorstein Veblen to understand that

Penn’s art is in thrall to the celebration of material excess and economic

power. Could he make high art out of a milieu that was so unreservedly

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devoted to aggressive consumption? This background debate remains muted

among critics who praise Penn’s originality, but the critics are left with

evaluating the sense of elegance and leisure-class indulgence that are

admixed in his sense of beauty. He once identified his desideratum when

staging his shoots, as looking for “the light of Paris as I had imagined it,

soft but defining.” That last phrase perfectly captures the strength and the

narcotic effect of untold wealth when seen by the impecunious.

* * * * *

In terms of an anchoring personality, Lawler comes across as much

more sly than Penn, much more suspicious of the field in which she

diligently labors and casually subverts. Like him she doesn’t dabble in easy

psychology, but maintains at least the illusion of mastery. Derived in part

from the example of the so-called Pictures Generation, which was concerned

with escaping excess abstraction or barren minimalism, and prized the blunt,

even aggressive presentation of insistent images, Lawler appears to have set

out to return photography to a confrontational plainness. Along the way she

saw what happens when we look at – or view –pictures and are guided by

how the frame of the picture controls its meaning. As the real is framed

when shot, so the shot is framed by the photographer’s choices about how to

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show us the picture (while also showing us how to preserve and value the

privileged moment of the “taking” of the picture).

Framing, as a physically grounded act and an esthetic decision, means

sizing and orienting and isolating and many other operations that are

conditioned and regulated by codes that often remain implicit and not

directly obvious in the act of viewing art; it can be a cleansing operation or a

masking one, depending on which code one observes. This “meta-level,”

whereby one can shift one’s focus in order to see how the frame itself

becomes part of one’s seeing, remains a steady concern for all visual artists,

and, to a lesser extent, those who are trained viewers. Lawler steadfastly

explores how the codes that govern the display of art use a self-awareness of

the way frames make the viewer conscious of the social habits that obtain in

museums and galleries. This becomes her version of what has been called

“institutional critique.” Here she pits herself against the controlling codes of

the art-world. This heighted awareness of the multi-layered contexts of

looking at pictures often operates beyond the visual attention of most

viewers. In plain terms, the artist cares more about who hangs the picture,

and all that such authorized display can mean (and owns it or offers it for

sale or fetishizes it or curates its display), than does the average viewer.

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This means a certain sort of explanation is in order. Several examples

suggest themselves. Take “Monogram” of 1984. It’s a vertical silver dye

bleach print of a king-size bed whose bed spread is adorned with an

elaborate monogram (that reads, roughly, as FTH) and topped off with four

square pillows. Hanging on the wall above the head of the bed is a Jasper

Johns painting of an all white American flag, as iconic as it is expensive.

The photo takes in both the Johns and the bed with an almost solemn tone

that gathers its force from a sense of distance and intimacy. As it works with

and against the high society status conferred by the very expensive Johns,

the set-up becomes at once offhand and quite cheeky. Just another wall

hanging in your bedroom? Yes, but you may likely see it differently from

the ordinary DIY home decorating project. As with Penn’s fashion items,

here the Johns work reads un-ignorably as an expressive sign of considerable

wealth. The illusion of calm mastery is produced with a coded use of the

rules of representation. But if we can domesticate a masterpiece, by hanging

it in someone’s bedroom rather than, say, the Metropolitan Museum of art,

then our inability to own it outright may be assuaged, at least marginally.

Lawler repeats this balancing act over and over, as our desire for the Johns

painting itself collides with and intensifies our knowing it is out of reach. In

her esthetic consideration of how the painting is hung there arise many

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different valuations, many shades of acquisitive desire, all of them

embedded in one another. (Marianne Moore has a poem on this set of issues,

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“When I Buy Pictures.” )

One of the ways the artist can use institutional critique is to bring even

his or her own art making activity under suspicion. Lawler does this when

she dissolves or redraws the very limits of framing. The most striking

example of this reframing of her photographs involves her making a hyper-

large blow up, printing the result on a sheet of vinyl and pasting it on one of

the walls in the exhibit. The print is overtaken by the environment, with the

“dimensions variable,” as Lawler plays with one of the codes (that the

picture and its frame should be specified as to measurement) that determine

the framing process. With variable dimensions, and the use of anamorphic

distortions, Lawler thus creates (or is it de-creates?) one of her shots as an

extended piece of designed wall paper. (Wallpaper is one of those things we

see without looking at, or look at without seeing. It often challenges the rules

of representation, but usually by being ordinary rather than opulent.) This

elaborate process giganticizes the photograph even as it shows us just how

far distortion can go without destroying its subject.

A distinct example of this rendering that distorts scale lies in one of the

exhibit’s wonders, “Pollyanna (adjusted to fit) distorted for the times.” A

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large printed vinyl sheet has on it an inked reproduction of an assembled

group of seven different photographs, all distorted by something like a fun-

house mirroring. So what do we end up with? A wall covering (of vinyl

sheeting) that is hung (by pasting it) on a wall, where seven (normally

quadrilateral) frames contain the various images that are here elongated and

bent out of shape, while they still (barely) maintain their status as a group of

normal pictures. We have, in other words, something like a riot of

representation as a set of codes undoes its formal prescriptive curbs or

checks. We are here shown how much can be done to a picture if its frame is

up for grabs.

If “Pollyanna” undercuts the fixity of her photographs by turning them

into a manipulated sheet of adhesive vinyl, her other use of this high-tech

medium works to undermine the content of the images in her photographs.

Take one of the most striking, “Pollock and Tureen (traced),” which exists in

two formats, or frames, one a regularly sized color photograph and the other

an enlarged reproduction of that photograph in the manner described below.

The “regular sized” picture of the Pollock and the tureen is a usual Lawler

subject where the significance of the hanging of an art work is conditioned

by its placement in a different sort of framed situation. Here the lower edge

of a Jackson Pollock that hangs on the wall hovers over an elaborate soup

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tureen, decorated and glazed, and sitting on an otherwise bare table. (This

clearly resembles the setup in “Monogram.” Lawler has similarly produced

dozens of framed pictures, and pictured frames, in her main body of work.)

The lines of the Pollock echo and are yet further scrambled by the floral

design on the tureen.

Then, however, Lawler has transformed (or reframed) the regular sized

photographic print, first by enlarging it to something like wall size

(dimensions variable), taken an instrument and drawn the outlines in the

photograph onto a sheet of blank white vinyl, of the type used in

“Pollyanna.” What we get is what looks like a giant pen and ink still-life

large scale drawing of a setting with objects, the Pollock and the tureen, that

are like ghostly echoes of the objects in her original photographic surface.

As Lawler drains off all the visual detail by the act of tracing, the result itself

becomes a kind of framing of the lines of the photograph, but shorn of all

color. She has re-framed and hence transformed one of her works into

another work, using only graphic outlines to “picture” and evoke the

meaning of the painting and the tureen. (There are seven other such

“tracings” in the show.)

Lawler employs a range of techniques – framing, reframing, enlarging,

tracing, juxtaposing, printing, reproducing – all in ways that are sometimes

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playful, but challenging, sometimes gently mocking and sometimes with a

touch of bitter satire. Instead of classic abstractions that define and redefine

objects by and into volumes and patterns, Lawler, by never abandoning her

commitment to the actual, always shows us a part of the real world, but one

displayed in an “unreal way.” As she put it once, “a picture is no substitute

for anything.” This makes the picture resolutely itself, even if it has been

through other versions of itself. It also suggests that Lawler doesn’t value

pictures over real things; every picture has a real object that it points to but

can never replace.

* * * * *

One easily derives considerable pleasure and information from looking

at Penn as a fashion photographer and Lawler as centered on institutional

critique. But both artists have broad ranges of interests and approaches. Penn

devotes some of his energies to geographical and ethnographic interests, and

his work with pre-industrial societies can easily be seen as an antidote to his

fashion work. Similar approaches are on show in both his Vogue covers and

his ethnographic subjects. Lawler uses as supports for small scale

reproductions of her photographs several kinds of mementos taken from a

panoply of the ephemera of dailiness, the matchbooks and postcards and

invitations that in fact function as re-framing gestures and so lead back to

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her main themes. It is as if she is tracing the tentacles of the art world from

their smaller locations to their most expensive embraces.

Penn and Lawler have both elevated the status of photography and

shown us, respectively, how the surface and the frame guide those of us who

are determined to see.

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NOTES

1. The Penn exhibit, organized by Maria Morris Hambourg and Jeff L.

Rosenheim, was seen at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from April

24th to July 30th, 2017. The Lawler, organized by Roxana Marcoci,

Senior Curator, with Kelly Sidley, Curatorial Assistant, was at the

Museum of Modern Art from April 30th to July 30th, 2017.

2. Judith Thurman, The New Yorker, September 27, 2004, 139.

3. In “Some bodies: Irving Penn’s nudes”, The New Yorker, January 21,

2002, 76.

4. “The Puzzle of Irving Penn,” New York Review of Books, Daily. May

2, 2017.

5. The poem ends with these lines, referring to the picture:

It comes to this: of whatever sort it is,

it must be “lit with piercing glances into the life of things”;
it must acknowledge the spiritual forces which have made it.

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