Thank you, Irving Penn

For years I judged my portraits thus: if they looked outwardly like Irving Penn's, then I was getting some place. But there was also that inner thing that he got at, that moment of conjoined awarenesses that was almost like kissing, and I knew I had to go after that too.

Here is my early portrait of Eugene Ionesco. See what I mean? A year before, I had been reading this avant-garde Franco-Romanian playwright in college, and now here I was photographing him...looking at me! I felt as though I had joined the world of art somewhere near the top. (And, coincidently, that college was...Penn!)

And here we are, from last week, a portrait of the writer John Irving. Still at it.

My friend Duane Michals, speaking of Penn, said that he was "a classic, like a Chanel dress."

I once wrote and asked if I might sit in while he did a portrait. He wrote back saying no, that he was always trying to forge a strong connection with a sitter, and that having someone else there, even off in a corner, would bend the line of that connection and weaken it.

I decided I'd settle for a print, so I wrote and asked what they cost. Someone at his office wrote back and gave a price of $250. Ha! There wasn't that much in the world...in my world, anyway. Don't I wish now I'd scraped it up somehow!

Several years ago I was wandering through the photography rooms at the Museum of Modern art for the first time in a while. I came into the last room a bit distractedly, and was struck by the feeling that I was being looked at...but there was no one there. Then I realized where the feeling was coming from. I was in a room full of Penn portraits. Ah, yes.

Last year there was a show of his portraits of artists and writers at the Morgan Library in New York. I spent several hours circling around the 70 or so prints. It was kind of like seeing old friends at a reunion, but the friends were the pictures, not the subjects. Slowly, I started to notice that the spaces around the subject's heads were more interesting than most people's photographs. No kidding.

So there are some lessons and some fruitfulness from Penn. Thank you, Irving, and goodbye.