Irving Penn’s "Two Guedras, Morocco, 1971

#somereallygoodones, #irvingpenn, #themaster, #twoguedras

The master is — for me — Mr. Irving Penn. I tell students that if they really want to learn about photography, they should check into a hotel room for a week with the classic Penn books by Penn from “Moments Preserved” (1960), “Worlds in a Small Room” (1974), “Flowers” (1990), “Passage” (1991), “Still Life” (2001), to “A Notebook at Random” (2004) and any of the books about him, notably “Earthly Bodies” (2002) and “Small Trades” (2009). Those would make for a perfect photo library. It is all there.

Mr. Penn is the master. He is the great photographer, vital and without peer. The images are remarkable, the prints are perfect, and as an artist, he seems to have remade himself continually.

Irving Penn’s "Two Guedras, Morocco, 1971” has been the touchstone for everything else in my collecting, in my life. It is not illustrated here. It is the cover image for “Worlds in a Small Room” and the iconic Penn image.

I sold it in 2020 as I attempt to distribute and deaccession my collections. If my residence were ever to have caught on fire, this is the picture I would have run back in to rescue. It is perfectly sited, classic two person pose in front of some sort of rough fabric. It is as if the subjects wandered into a studio from the desert. The platinum palladium print is dazzling. If you hold it up very, very close to your eye, it expands into constellations of silver and metals, transporting you to a different dimension. The light bounces — careens within the frame — deliriously. The Guedras themselves are female spiritualists, shamans of the desert beckoning one on. “Follow.” They have size and ballast; they anchor me.

Secrets and balance.

You can never spend too much money on a photograph if you absolutely love it. If you love it then you must have it if you can. No question. You must love it completely. Then sell the farm. Be happy. It was very serious money for me. There is an answer to the question of how I paid for all this stuff but it will remain unanswered here. Collectors collect what they can. I have always felt collecting was my version of tithing in my own private church.

There is a colossal irony that incrementally building up this eccentric collection of photographs created something of enormous value, far more successfully that any investments I might have made in the stock market. It became my annuity.

Note to reader: behave passionately.

Years ago I sold one of his “Small Trades” images. It feels like an insane, wanton act now.

In the late 1990s at a Christies preview, I stumbled across a odd yet striking portrait of an older man. I felt instinctively that it was Mr. Penn although I do not know how I would known what he looked like.

The portrait is memorable because the right half of it is out of focus as if the artist could spilt himself in half. It seemed like a metaphor for confusion, and I later discovered that, indeed, he had made it shortly after the death of his wife.

It seems to describe an attempt at self realization. It is bold and understated at the same moment — seen and preserved.

Penn would create whole portfolios of work and keep them out of sight until the time was right to release them — whatever that meant to him.

Early in my collecting I acquired a Penn image of a woman, lying full length face down on a bed. It was “Girl in Bed (Jean Patchett), New York”, again a platinum-palladium print flush-mounted on aluminum. It was for me a beginners choice. I saw it in a gallery, I liked it and although it was expensive I acquired it. It seemed dramatic without being specific. I had women friends who found it violent, as if the woman had been forced down on to the bed.

I simply liked it.

One day I was in the MoMA after they had reinstalled their Steichen Galleries, and there, lo and behold, was a print of “Girl in Bed”. It was extraordinary to me that I could own a work of art that was in a museum too. Not only that I could see that my print was superior. I was speechless.

He and his estate are exacting about where and how his works may be reproduced. Basically, the answer is no. When I sought permission to use the “Two Guedras” in my book “The Unseen Eye”, I kept being turned down. I tried so hard to persuade the studio that even his studio manager remarked on my efforts and asked me to stop. Strangely Mr.Penn did let me use it for a school catalogue.

The great Mr. Penn.

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