Read Adam Gopnik’s “Postscript” on photographer Irving Penn
October 18, 2009
I wish I could copy the entire text here, but more properly I urge you to read the Adam Goipnik’s short “postscript”article about Penn at the New Yorker web site. Here’s the concluding paragraph:
photograph by Irving Penn
Penn’s subject—as in “Woman with Long Black Neck” … —is not performance but inner poise, and the dignity of appearances became his central theme. His work is a memorial of a specially privileged era, where the duties of a fashion photographer and the ambitions of an artist could coexist in one serenely realized surface, an age that in retrospect seems to have been one of fine silver, coolly applied
Also on the web site is a slide show of some of Penn’s best work.
This issue of the New Yorker also has a compelling article by Malcolm Gladwell about the dangers of football. Gladwell doesn’t call for us to abolish the “sport”, but it’s hard to imagine any other conclusion from the data he presents.
