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.

Man Lighting Girl’s Cigarette (Jean Patchett), New York, 1949. Image courtesy of The Irving Penn Foundation.

July 31, 2017 by Nalina Moses

EXCELLENT EXOTICA

Is India becoming fashionable once again? Fashionistas are drinking turmeric milk and wearing mango-print dresses. And there are two new prominent photo essays on Indian street fashion. One, in the Times, by Brooklyn photographer Mark Hartman, called Capturing the Colorful Style of Punjab , India, focuses on residents of that northern state. Another, in National Geographic, by Danish photographer Ken Hermann, called Flower Men, focuses on Kolkata flower vendors.

Hartman’s photos are exactly what the title promises: shots of women in colorfully mismatched salwars, duppattas, bangles, and bindis, and men in candy-hued turbans, cartoon mustaches, and aviator glasses. The shots are too loosely composed for my taste. Subjects are most often captured unknowingly, staring benignly into the middle distance, sweetened in honey-colored sunlight. The shots betray a naive cultural fascination, as if taken during a middle American couple’s first holiday on the subcontinent. These photographs have less to do with fashion than anthropology. One could find more bracing Indian style on a street corner in Jackson Heights.

Hermann’s photos are precisely the inverse: strident, classically-composed portraits of men at work. He poses the flower vendors formally, on a walkway along the Hugli River, in strong midday sunlight that bleaches the background and quiets the lush, riotous tones of their skin, fabric and flowers. Each man stands straight, at the center of the frame, and looks directly into the camera, handsome, alert, and quietly proud. A caption below notes his name and the varieties of flowers he sells.

Most remarkably, Hermann’s photos go beyond portraiture to capture something of the lunatic grace and excess of India, which only someone who’s spent significant time there understands. The basket of long, crimpled ashoka leaves Angad Ray balances on his head makes an Ascot-worthy hat, and his lungi is folded around his knees with the studied asymmetries of a Comme des Garcons skirt. Kulwinder carries thick garlands of marigolds over each shoulder that fan out around him like a medieval priest’s cloak. These photographs trade in exoticism, for sure, but it’s an artful one.

Photograph courtesy of Ken Hermann and National Geographic.

May 20, 2017 by Nalina Moses

MARVELOUS

Cultural critic Hilton Als has curated a show at David Zwirner called Uptown, that collects portraits Alice Neel made of her neighbors in Spanish Harlem during the 60′s and 70′s. It’s possible to stroll through, take it in, and reach the simple, uncomplicated conclusion, “Marvelous.” The exhibit offers all the pleasures of painting without troubling intellectual or aesthetic subject matter. The canvases are handsome, vibrantly colored, and simple to appraise. Here is a streetwise but troubled young man. Here is an older woman who must have been a knockout in her youth. Here is a distinguished gentleman, a pillar of the community. But there are richer, more uncommon currents just below the surface.

Neel’s manner of depicting her subjects, in small vertical canvases, in a simple frontal view as they gaze straight back at the painter, fuses portraiture with self-presentation — with performance. As a white woman artist living in an enclave of working class blacks, Latinos and immigrants, Neel was an outsider, and remained keenly aware of of her status. Some of the paintings’ titles wrankle: Arab, Black Spanish Family, Two Puerto Rican Boys, Cyrus the Gentle Iranian. Yet her portraits don’t have the sting of anthropology, or offer an empty celebration of diversity. Her approach is clear-eyed and painterly. These canvases document the world she moves in, just as it is, without adornment, and without drama.

Neel depicts her subjects truly, soberly noting asymmetries and blemishes in face and figure. The sitters offer themselves easily for view but not for judgment. They are preternaturally relaxed, without a need to put on airs, sitting patiently as their portraits are crafted. Neel, in return, grants them a distance and mystery that confer dignity.

Alice Neel, Anselmo, 1962. Image courtesy of Alice Neel and David Zwirner.

March 27, 2017 by Nalina Moses

A LOST WORLD

MoMA has mounted a 40th anniversary exhibit of photographer Nan Goldin’s 1986 book The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, that captured her bohemian Lower East Side community with anthropological clarity, and also love. The framed shots, about 8″x10″, seem loosely composed, like snapshots, but carry a stunning physical and emotional immediacy. The most famous one, a self-portrait, shows Goldin in full makeup, a month after she’s been beaten so severely by a boyfriend that she can barely open her eyes. Thirty years afterwards, in a culture numbed by internet porn, reality TV and Tinder, these images do not shock. Instead they stir up nostalgia for a time in New York City, the early 1980′s, when rents were cheap, downtown was different from uptown, and young people moved to the city to become artists and writers rather than venture capitalists and fashion bloggers. New York City served as a vital refuge those who didn’t have the freedom to act out their lives in other places.

Today, the most powerful photographs in The Ballad are those that pull back from the faces and figures to show that world itself: kitchens with battered white metal appliances, bedrooms with bare walls and windows, hotel rooms with flocked wallpaper and mismatched lamps, basement bars with neon lighting and sticky floors. The handful of still lifes on display are surprisingly moving. They capture a mood by giving a glimpse of the corner of a room, a tabletop arrangement, or the wall of an apartment hallway. The manner in which people decorate their homes reveals their values bitingly, innocently, and eloquently. For Goldin’s friends expressiveness, color, corrosiveness and humor matter far more than order.

Goldin’s most unique gift is, surely, her ability to capture the heightened emotional drama between two people – that moment that promises a vital connection or tearing apart. But when she pulls her gaze back further, to reveal these people within their habitat, her photos are even more powerful. One shows two young men sitting behind a small round table at a bar, a cluster of half-empty cocktail glasses obscuring their faces. The view is gently out-of-plumb and softly cropped, so that the entire world seems to be slowly tipping, unable to right itself. These men might be falling for one another or having a lover’s quarrel. And this might be precisely what it felt like to be a young person, in New York City, in the early 1980′s.

January 21, 2017 by Nalina Moses