The greatest passes.

Mrs. Irving Penn – Lisa Fonssagrives

Irving Penn has left us at age 92 and is doubtless, even now, arranging the set just so for some new work featuring his renowned high aesthetic sense in the afterlife.

No photographer of the Twentieth Century can match his all around greatness. His superb taste, his extraordinary originality, his sense of design and his exceptional technical skills – all these left one breathless. He truly was a man who proved that talent is distributed anything but evenly across the population.

He has left a prolific oeuvre which all photographers can enjoy and from which we can only learn how woefully inadequate our talents are.

Quote: “The camera makes me nervous. It’s like a razor blade. I’d like to protect myself from the incisions it can make.” There are very few images of Penn, but many by him, which is as it should be.

Fellow dog lover.

It’s not hard to recognize ace fashion photographer Bruce Weber. The bandanna and his ever present dogs are a giveaway.

Given that I have hardly ever met a dog I did not like, it’s easy to enjoy this spread from the current Vanity Fair where Weber has photographed himself in a sea of old film cameras, juxtaposed with his dogs as part of a fund raising effort.

Bruce Weber, cameras and dogs.

Forgotten but great

Take the style of Hoyningen-Huene and the class of Horst, add a dollop of good old American humor and what do you get?

Why, John Rawlings, of course.

If you like your fashion with a touch of spice and irreverence, you need go no further.

The book is out of print, but the photography remains splendid. It’s called “John Rawlings: 30 Years in Vogue” and you can find it on the web. Depending on your point of view, it’s either dead cheap or you just don’t get it.

A Depression era icon

I have finally set to right the inexcusable omission of a monograph on Dorothea Lange from my library.

Where Walker Evans mostly photographed things, Lange photographed people. And her pictures always seem to get to the emotional heart of her subjects and the horrors of the Great Depression.

The monograph, titled ‘Dorothea Lange: Photographs of a Lifetime’, is a splendid review of her work, covering the period 1932-59 and, as with all monographs published by Aperture, is of the highest quality.

It’s overpriced new, but my used copy came from Strand Books for under $40. That’s another bookseller which should be in every photographer’s address book.

In the photographer’s words:

“You force yourself to watch and wait. You accept all the discomfort and the disharmony. Being out of your depth is a very uncomfortable thing …. You force yourself onto strange streets, among strangers. It may be very hot. It may be painfully cold. It may be sandy and windy and you say “What am I doing here? What drives me to do this hard thing?”

The book relates the story of how she came to take her most famous picture, that of the migrant mother in Nipomo, CA. The story is so incredible that I will not retell it here and suggest, instead, that you buy this book to read all about it.

If you want to see the depredations visited upon this great nation by stunningly incompetent administrations of both parties, aided and abetted by a seemingly uncaring and callous Federal Reserve, you need go no further than Lange’s great humanism, as displayed in her pictures.