Here’s added impetus to get you to the Irving Penn show this weekend

This “Sunday at the Met” talk will feature Vogue’s Phyllis Posnick in conversation with writer Vince Aletti and the museum’s photography curator Jeff L. Rosenheim. Walking through “Irving Penn: Centennial,” which the Executive Fashion Editor describes as “a very powerful show,” is a bittersweet experience for Posnick. “It’s like seeing old friends; I mean, I love those pictures, [but] it’s always sort of melancholy when I see them because I miss him.”

Posnick’s first encounter with Penn, who passed away in 2009 at the age of 92, was as an assistant. Later, Alex Liberman, then the editorial director of Condé Nast, would pair her with Penn (and Helmut Newton, among others). Liberman “thought that we would be a good combination,” the editor explains. “I guess he knew that Penn liked me and he threw us together, and behind the scenes he helped the process along.” Though it took time to build trust and a way of working together—which they did for more than 20 years—the images created by this dream team have made their mark on the world. Their relationship, naturally, affected Posnick. “I always hear his voice,” she says. “When we’re shooting, if we get stuck, I think What would Penn do? or How would he solve it? I don’t know [the answer] but it gives me a certain thought process. Penn taught all of us who worked with him [to] think things through more carefully.” Here, in advance of her talk, Posnick shares some of the lessons she learned when working with the inimitable Irving Penn.

You can never be too well prepared.
People say, “Oh, you’re so careful about your shoots.” And I say, “Yes, because I learned from Penn [to be].” He taught me to be better prepared—I was always prepared—but he considered every detail. When we talked about fashion, I’d show him the clothes, and when we did the fitting he’d say: “What do you think the hair should look like?” and “What are you thinking for the makeup?” and “Are you going to put gloves on? What are the shoes?” and “Is she going to have anything in her hand?” He asked every possible question about what the model might be wearing. I think he wanted to make sure that I saw a picture, and he wanted to be able to see a picture, and that we were going in the same direction. But then, of course, when we got to the shoot, things changed. We had a hairdresser and makeup artist, and in front of the camera we’d take the glove off, or put a glove on, so it was rarely exactly what we had talked about because there were too many variables, but at least it gave us a direction and we had something to work with.

Creativity can be applied to problem-solving, as well as pictures.
Before I started to work with Penn, I heard stories of how he sent models away and didn’t like this model or that model, so what I did, once I started to work with him—whenever we did fashion, not as much with the beauty—we did a fitting. If he didn’t know the model I wanted to use, that I hoped he [would] want, I had her come to the studio and try on the clothes. That way he could get a sense of how she moved and how she looked in the clothes, and see how she responded to him. That solved the problem of him not liking the model, or having a difficult time, because he could tell right away.

He liked the top models: I worked with him with Gisele, with Nadja, Christy Turlington, Linda, Kate Moss. [The qualities he looked for in a model?] One was concentration, another was a very natural way of moving. Shalom was one of his favorites; Nadja was another, as was Lisa Cant, who is very beautiful. I think we did more with Caroline Trentini than anyone else. She has a grace and a way of moving that was exactly what he wanted as well. Shalom was a dancer, and it shows; and Lisa, his wife, had been a dancer, so that was a quality that he responded to.

Never settle.
I always hear Penn’s voice. Sometimes we’ll be doing a picture and someone will say, “You don’t have to get the real thing, we can use this instead of whatever.” And I’m thinking, “No, we can’t.” Sometimes we do, but all of those things that meant so much to him stick in my head. [The chastity belt picture] was interesting. It was for an article on advances in birth control and Penn had already done a picture of a birth control pill. So, we thought of the original birth control—actually, the chastity belt wasn’t for birth control, but that was one of the side effects of wearing a chastity belt. Penn wanted a medieval one, so I had to find one. We contacted dealers in armor but it was really difficult. We finally found someone who I think collected fetish items and we got the chastity belt. And then we had to find a model that fit it because people were smaller then, so we had to do a fitting—that was another interesting fitting.

Respect the power of words.
[Before a sitting,] I went to the studio and would tell Penn about the article that we hoped he would illustrate. I had to be careful in the way I described the subject, even if it was fashion, because if I described it the wrong way he would lose interest immediately. But as I talked about something and as he became more interested, he would draw and he’d show me the drawing and say, “This is what I’d like to do.” Often a day or two later he would fax another drawing, and in those cases the photographs look exactly like the drawings.

Penn took things beyond the obvious, but then he went the other way and shot things that to him were obvious. The bee-stung lip, for example, which came from an old expression from his era, from the ’50s. Turkey neck, for the Nora Ephron article on aging necks, was another one; the expression is, “Oh, she has a turkey neck.” There’s another picture where the model is wearing two burlap sacks—that was for an article on sunscreening clothing. The clothing was so awful that I mentioned that old expression, “It looks like she's wearing a sack.” And so we did a sack.

Be open to challenges.
When we did the chocolate mouth, which was for an article about chocolate, Penn was imagining the messy way children eat, so he put the chocolate around the model’s mouth and then had her lick it off. And I had to interview models and look at their mouths and see if they had the right mouth and tongue and send them to the studio. You’d be surprised how many different tongues there are.

Think creatively.
I don’t use reference pictures, which some people do, because I think that kills creativity. You show someone something and they say, “Oh, that’s what we’re doing.” I want the opposite. I want them to do something they’ve never done before, or do something different, and that’s what Penn was after; it came from him. Penn never wanted to shoot the obvious. The “cult creams” story is an example. That was illustrating some new white cream moisturizers, which are incredibly dull to photograph, and he got the idea of dropping cream on the model’s head from an old TV show from the 1950s. As I was describing the idea to him, he said, “Did you ever hear of someone named Milton Berle?” And I said, “Yes.” And he said, “Well, on that show, Milton Berle would be on stage and someone would yell, ‘Makeup!’ ” A guy would come running on to the stage with a bag of white powder and smack [Berle] in the face with the powder. Penn said he liked that image, and could we pour a bucket of cream on a girl’s head. I said sure. So, then we had to get the cream—lots of it—from upstate. The model sat in a blow-up kiddie pool in the studio so the cream wouldn’t get all over the place. We had two models because it was exhausting; we had to clean them off after every couple of pours. By the end of the day, the studio smelled of sour milk.

Always be ready to make the grade.
We were doing an article about the back—a lot of the fashion revealed that part of the body. Penn loved to do nudes, so I asked him if he would be interested in doing that picture, and how would he see it. He loved the idea of it and he said he wanted to use Gisele, but that since [the picture] would be taken from the back, I should make sure to tell her that her face wasn’t going to show in the picture. So, I called and spoke to her, and she said yes instantly. When we did the sitting, she was lying in front of the camera with her back to him and she just looked over her shoulder and kind of wiggled her bottom into a different position and she said, “So, is this okay, Mr. Penn?” And of course he said yes. And then she moved again, and he said, “That’s very good.” Of course her face showed. I think he always intended to show her face, because he really respected the models, especially someone like Gisele who he liked, but it was just the way he tested people to see if they were serious about the picture, if they really wanted to do it.

Be true to your vision.
You know, people try to copy him and they can’t. Nobody can do a Penn picture because the picture was in his head. It’s the light, it’s the lens, it’s the angle, it’s the approach to it, all those factors—and the intellect—make a picture.

Source: vogue.com