I couldn’t possibly tell you when I first discovered Irving Penn. Honestly, I haven’t a clue. I was never one to look at the name below a photo, not until I became a photographer, so I can’t tell you that from my early days I even knew who he was. I didn’t. I just know that, like George Hurrell, he has always been in my memory and there isn’t a single photo I have taken that in some way he has not influenced.
I can’t point to a particular photo of his and say that this one image more than any other has touched me or shaped my style. I can’t say that just one of his images became the seminal link between his work and what has now become the NyghtFalcon style. I can’t. But he is there. I see it in the way I see the world. I feel it in the way I hold my camera. I am aware of it when I think about how I will approach a still life, a model, a building….. Somehow he taught me how to see into people, into things, into the world around me and this ability to disarm and be disarmed is why we say that the art of photography is learning to see the world again for the first time.
Perhaps that’s what I did and perhaps that is how I first discovered Penn.
Up the street from us lived a couple who had no children. We adopted them and I confess that once I discovered my “Uncle” Howie’s penchant for magazine subscriptions I spent hours and hours on the steps to their cellar consumed in images. When I was old enough, I was allowed to actually go into the cellar and there lost myself in an endless collection of magazines. I am sure it was there that I found Penn and Avedon and Smith and Parks.
Howie died more than twenty years ago and I left Connecticut and the cellar filled with magazines while still in my teens. Yet, it seems that I have carried with me all these years those photographs Irving Penn left for me to find – like the fabled trail of crumbs that enabled me to find my way home, my way to the person I always should have been. It has been a long road – one filled with more twists and turns and dark nyghts than I care to remember. And here I am. Where I always should have been.
Thank you, Irving Penn, for helping me find my way home.
Tags: fashion, Irving Penn, NyghtFalcon, photography, remembering
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I found it after being recomme nded by [...]