Irving Penn: Worlds in a Small Room
by Dan Wagner
As the COVID-19 pandemic rages around the globe, so many of us have seen our own expansive world shrink to the rooms we inhabit. Lockdowns have kept us quarantined. Almost too many nations—and even neighboring states—to count will not let Americans pass their borders. It is a time where travel beckons, but has become far too elusive—if not impossible.
It is the perfect time to revisit a favorite photography book. Worlds in a Small Room by Irving Penn as an ambulant studio photographer transports its readers to unexpected locations the world over.
“I would often find myself daydreaming of being mysteriously deposited (with my ideal north-light studio) among the disappearing aborigines in remote parts of the earth,” Penn confesses in his introduction to the book. “This book is a record of ten variations of that fantasy come true.”
Beginning in Cuzco in 1948, he thus set up a portable studio in some of the most inaccessible corners of the planet, among people who were often unfamiliar with studio photography of any kind. Over the years, his dream took him from Dahomey to Morocco, from Nepal to New Guinea, from Crete to –yes – San Francisco. A New York plumber with his wrench and Parisian pastry cooks were captured with the same clarity of vision, elegance of composition, and obvious respect as were the mud-masked men of Asaro, New Guinea or Brahman women of Nepal.
Visiting San Francisco in 1967, he shot hippies and Hell’s Angels who, surprisingly, gaze equally openly at the camera. Cretan peasant women seem as elemental as characters from ancient myths.
Armchair travel is easy with Penn as the guide: gypsies of the Spain’s Extremadura region present themselves proudly and unblinkingly to the masterful Penn, while burka-draped women from southern Morocco become impersonal, almost totemic, statues, with the three round flat loaves of bright white bread held by one providing a welcome contrast to her black garb. “The Arab women are very timid about posing,” Penn writes. “It is said that they feel the camera is an evil eye that can steal their soul.”
It is, in fact, remarkable that Penn was able to show the very souls of so many people in this collection of memorably honest and direct pictures. With their controlled yet expressive range of blacks, whites and grays and unflinchingly direct imagery, these pictures confirm Penn’s reputation as one of the great masters of 20th-century black and white photography.
All the photographs in Worlds in a Small Room were taken with a Rolleiflex camera loaded with Kodak Tri-X film. “I am devoted to this machine, which has been my companion for many years and on many trips,” he writes. “It was the first camera I owned, bought before I ever thought of being a photographer. . . .It has come to be an extension of my body and brain.”
Originally published in 1974, and long out of print, Worlds in a Small Room can still be purchased at amazon.com and is certain to expand the horizons of a seemingly shrinking world.
I hope this information will make your world feel a little less small. Thanks for visiting The Cranky Camera!