Chimney Sweep

Public show of affection! For the long-lasting photographer Irving Penn, trend and artwork itself, from Jane Corkin at her eponymous Toronto gallery

“I love her. How can you not love her?”

Like a hummingbird that flits from photo to photo while she drives me with her enthusiasm, Jane Corkin leads me personally through an exhibition by Irving Penn, right in her gallery of the same name.

Her bespectacled brio is always in place, even over the years (it’s been nearly four decades since Macleans Magazine named her the “First Lady of Photography”). Also the pluck of the Mary Richards vintage or possibly the “wonderful Mrs. Maisel”. Corkin is a one-woman advertisement for this saying: Do something you love and you will not work a day in your life.

A hero of the art world in Toronto and beyond – one of the few people on the continent who really promoted photography as a medium long before anyone else got on that artistic train – Corkin seems like a charm for the fourth time. At least when it comes to the legendary Lensman Penn. “I had previously done three exhibitions of his work,” she says and actually knew him personally from her visits to his Manhattan studio. This latest retrospective? The first since his death in 2009. It was time.

These lines. These silhouettes. That studied rigor.

The rugged beauty of the work is welcome at this cruel time of the year – his work as a portraitist is so synonymous with Vogue that the magazine’s legendary editor Anna Wintour dedicated the entire July 2007 issue to him on the occasion of his 90th birthday (Riffing about his 66 years with the magazine and its unprecedented 165 covers!). Later Penn’s last assignment in his pages? A famous dark-spotted banana still life for a story about the signs of aging.

“As a little girl, I always looked at his photos. I would rip them out of the magazine. I didn’t know the name Penn, but I knew the job, “Corkin began to say, remembering her young self who had grown up in Boston (many years before she began a love affair with Canada after attending Queen’s University, and spruced up her photography when she got a job at the David Mirvish Gallery in Toronto in the 1970s).

Did young Jane hang these cut-ups on her bedroom walls? I ask.

“I put them in files,” laughs the Gallerista. “I was very organized.”

Irving Penn, balloon dealer (B), Paris, 1950. © Condé Nast.  On display at the Corkin Gallery (Toronto, Canada) November 24, 2021 - January 29, 2022.

In particular, she remembers the last six pages of Vogue that were once the exclusive province of Penn – a kind of charter – when he was first wooed to join the magazine by the legendary Condé Nast-Honcho Alexander Liberman. These pages were a lively mix that had nothing to do with his commercial commitments and often featured his so-called “Small Trades” photos – an oeuvre dedicated to workers, street vendors and artisans. Many of them are now being incorporated into the Toronto exhibition.

Parking attendant. Train coach-waiters. Tender blast furnace. Sandblaster. Chimney sweeper. Window cleaner. Balloon seller. The titles attached to these particular images – all of calm dignity and glamorous in their own way – speak for themselves. They go very well with some of the more outwardly fashion-oriented photos that they hang next to in many cases here in the Corkin Gallery; also in dialogue with the hippie photos from San Francisco from the 1960s, which make up a third of this exhibition.

“He was absolutely an anthropologist,” says Corkin, straightening up in her indigo blue Fluevog booties.

Zicky, then jagged, we finally end up on a picture of Lisa Fonssagrives, the Swedish eye-catcher who is often referred to as the “first supermodel”. Penn got so obsessed after capturing her for a Vogue distribution in 1947 that he married the woman. They were together until their death in the 1990s. There is only one photo of her here (“Cocoa-colored Balenciaga dress” reads the caption) and it reminds of what I’ve read about her: how her knowledge of the camera and her training as a dancer her poses with A special grace ; how she saw herself as a moving sculpture; how much he influenced her and she influenced him. A creative partnership that has lasted for decades, if it ever existed.

Irving Penn, The Tarot Reader (Jean Patchett and Bridget Tichenor), New York, 1949. © Condé Nast.  On display at the Corkin Gallery (Toronto, Canada) November 24, 2021 - January 29, 2022.

Has Penn ever attended any of his previous exhibitions curated by Corkin? Back to her first groundbreaking exhibition in the 1980s, in her first art space in a former shoe factory on Front Street (the first gallery to open outside of Yorkville, here in town)? I wondered.

The answer: yes and no.

“He didn’t like openings. He was a quiet man dedicated to his craft, ”she says. But once, eons ago, the master slipped to Toronto without further ado, visited the exhibition and only later informed Corkin by handwritten note that he had been there at all and was grateful. elusive!

“I am amazed at how people continue to react to his work; People of all ages, from the 80s to the 20s and 30s, ”she adds, turning back to this current collective term. “The children of former customers are coming in now … and are interested in an acquisition. Penn is really timeless. It doesn’t get old. “

Irving Penn: Small Trades, 1960s San Francisco, Fashion runs at the Corkin Gallery in the Distillery District through December 19, closes over the holidays, and continues into the new year. See www.corkingallery.comShinan Govani is a Toronto-based freelance columnist covering culture and society. Follow him on Twitter: @shinangovani

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