Looking out towards the harbour of A Coruña, at Fundación MOP, the exhibition Centennial by Irving Penn, held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and curated by Maria Morris Hambourg and Jeff L. Rosenheim, presents approximately 175 photographs by one of the twentieth century’s most prominent photographers. Upon entering the exhibition area, and surrounded by drab painted walls tinged with brown, garnet and khaki, mimicking corrosive wear and tear, comparable to the background on which Penn photographed – and which is now on display, – we start to walk on a terrain that is unclear whether it is dream or reality. In other words, we cannot tell whether the creative intent and outcome are symptomatic of a documental perspective on reality, or of an expressionist perception of it. The figures portrayed are not caricatures, neither are they unaware of the vaguely somnambulistic condition with which unsuspecting people in their day-to-day existence appear in the scenic illusion offered by photography. They are not circus-like, but they are not purely presentational portraits. Admittedly, the best dreams, the most striking ones, those that become more or less analytical obsessions subduing wakefulness, all seem to retain the physical influence of objects between themselves, leading our eyes to the joints and cracks in matter: as if the world were being displayed to us like a vast symphony whose conductor is or is not present, identifiable or not. Like dreams, music has been written too far back for us to draw a single, primal score from it. All we can find are its multiple orchestration mechanisms and, as such, the ways in which we can immerse ourselves in an engrossing perspective on things.

The curators at Centennial have tried to portray the different phases of Penn’s career, without presenting them in any partitioned format – the exhibition is spacious, connecting its divisions -, otherwise this would not be an accurate expression of their commitment to the artist, whose diverse interests have been studied without being tied to a singular professional agenda that could separate them from each other: from portraits for the fashion magazine Vogue to the photography of indigenous communities stretching from India to Morocco, as well as Guinea, Penn’s work certainly reveals the vertigo – i.e, the overwhelming lure of the abyss – brought about by the endless array of singularities the figures contain. To some extent, all the models photographed are just like faces, presentational shots to be looked at, for as long as their magnetism warrants. If they are presentational faces – even if the face itself is obliterated -, they are so through the openness they afford to their elongation, their transgression, their urgent and essential fictional reworking.

The photographer’s deference to the people he is willing to shoot is the same whether the subject is Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, the top model he would later marry, or two Mexican children in the city of Cusco. The gesture of positioning the camera at the level of the photographed models simply testifies to how the motion of bending the knees, bending the back, peering through the deepest hole and then standing there waiting to be stunned is, if the objective is to stretch body and mind guided by the other, the sanest and most righteous act of generosity and, one could even say, verticality. The way in which the male figure, a Mexican man, is turned with his back to the camera is striking, his expression no less forceful and unique than that of another figure who, in the very same position, has his face exposed in front of the camera. In some photographs, when the model is wearing a hat, it is not immediately clear whether the face is blocked by the shadow, the hat cradling the face, or whether the figure is in fact backwards. On two occasions, I had to step closer to the photograph to understand whether or not I was dreaming of a face. The face was visible in some instances, but not in others. All of this – and this is the key takeaway from this brief account – is enough to conclude that faces are always dreamt. They are one of our dreams, pulled along by the more or less long shadow, or rather the more or less generous cut-out of that other dream which is our own face, itself the way – more or less broadly – how we make ourselves visible to others.

Whilst the portraits of well-known names such as Picasso, Joan Didion, Ingmar Bergman, Jean Cocteau, Truman Capote or Audrey Hepburn bear particular stylistic marks to those portrayed, it is also true that this same ensemble is joined by innumerable anonymous people: Morocco’s black-veiled women, Guinea’s living masks, representatives of small trades. But this is not the movement. It is rather the opposite: it is not the celebrities who join the anonymous, but the anonymous who rule Irving Penn’s jigsaw play, thus assembling his theatre, his fairy forest, his elf playground. No one else has ever so perfectly grasped the luscious textures of the Balenciaga haute couture brand, laid out on the slender bodies of women who only seem to fluoresce – like the trail of a shooting star – as if to honour the stitched ingenuity of a play. From building an album of leading personalities, from the worlds of fashion to literature, theatre and architecture, Irving Penn focuses his glance and shares it with us, on cigarette butts, displayed on a large scale and vertically, equating these remnants with human figures, in an everlasting reminder of the satirical aspect of the human condition, the root of which is to be a remnant, a tangible ghost, the lost relic of accrued, blurred, confused temporalities. Right beside the room with large pictures of cigarette butts stands a wall with flowers photographed at the very moment they start to wither.

This is an exhibition-testimony to photographic art and a life lesson, whereby the fiction of others is the most reliable sign of attentiveness to what we find odd and the most courageous manner of looking inwards, serving ourselves to a world that we must be worthy of, just as it invites us to be present, without the need to distinguish inside from outside.

Irwin Penn’s Centennial is at Centro MOP in A Coruña until May 1, 2025.

Umbigo travelled to A Coruña on the invitation of Fundación MOP.