IRVING PENN

— Irving Penn, 1995

This exhibition will be dedicated to a rarely seen series of photographs by IrvingPenn capturing the groundbreaking work of the American choreographer AnnaHalprin. Taken in 1967, the carefully composed images are the result of Penn’scollaboration with the Dancers’ Workshop of San Francisco, which he pho-tographed performing Halprin’s improvisational choreography The Bath. Thegroup of 14 photographs, which were printed for the first time in 1995, highlightsHalprin’s pioneering approach to movement and reveals a more experimentalside to Penn’s practice. Since the exhibition at the Maison Européenne de laPhotographie in 1997, curated by Jean-Luc Monterosso and Pascal Hoël, theyhave not been shown together in Paris.

The summer of 1967 in San Francisco has become known as the ‘Summer ofLove’. Young people converged on the city, drawn to its burgeoning countercul-ture that broke the taboos of American society, promoting community, altruism,mysticism and free love. Fascinated by the movement, Irving Penn travelledto the Bay Area the following September to document its participants with aseries of group portraits to be published in Look magazine. He wanted, as hetermed it, to ‘look into the faces of these new San Francisco people through acamera in a daylight studio, against a simple background, away from their owndaily circumstances.’

At the heart of the avant-garde art scene in the 1960s was the Dancers’Workshop of San Francisco. Their founder and choreographer, Anna Halprin,was a pioneer of postmodern dance. Her practice promoted healing and a senseof community through body awareness and improvised group interactions basedon ritual, which radically changed modern dance. ‘Dance is breath made visible’,Halprin said of her approach. Her daring performances were often participatoryand rarely took place in traditional stage settings, with one instance leading toa summons for indecent exposure only a few short months before Irving Pennphotographed the troupe.

In the original performances of The Bath, the nude dancers bathed each otherin fountains or using jugs and buckets of water. ‘The performance of the simpleaction,’ writes Halprin in her notes on The Bath, ‘the natural action, objectifieswhat is really going on inside the performer’s self.’ Penn omits the containers inhis photographs, although fine droplets of water appear here and there on thedancers’ skin, and wet patches remain on the studio floor. When Halprin sawthe pictures, she observed that Penn’s compositions put forward ‘the absolutepurity of a boy and girl relating to each other in the most magical way, and yetit seemed real. What [the dancers] were left with was creating the essence ofthe bath, but it had nothing to do with actual bathing anymore.’

Although the majority of the dancers remain unnamed, Halprin’s daughterDaria Halprin can be identified throughout the photographs, her powerfulgaze highlighted by Penn in one of the series’ most arresting images. Comingin laterally from the window on the north side of the studio, the daylight wrapsitself around the dancers’ bodies as they interlace. ‘The pictures are primarilyof embraces’, Penn remarked upon rediscovering the photographs in 1995,‘beautiful and touching. Here they are without clothes, there’s love, the gesturesare tenderly erotic but certainly not pornographic.’

And yet the photographs were considered too daring to be published in ‘TheIncredibles’ essay featured in the 9 January 1968 issue of Look magazine.According to Vasilios Zatse, deputy director of the Irving Penn Foundation, theyremained forgotten for almost three decades until Halprin contacted Penn in1995 enquiring about the photographs for her archive. He selected 14 negativesand printed them for her, using the gelatin silver process. Although the two nevermet, Penn stated at the time: ‘I didn’t know Ann[a] Halprin at all, but I know fromthese pictures, I tell you, I like her very much.’

Dance was a recurring theme throughout Penn’s career. From his photographs ofAmerican ballet companies in 1946, to his 1999 series capturing the movementsof dancer and choreographer Alexandra Beller, the artist maintained an interestin new and avant-garde forms of performance. It is undoubtedly thanks tohis affinity for the art form that Penn was able to capture The Bath with suchacuteness. Where Halprin found that the photographs brought out the essenceof her own work, Penn remarked that they gave him a sense of ‘serenity’,which he was, in his words, ‘not used to.’ The series, therefore represents aunique confluence between modern photography and postmodern dance andconstitutes a rare document of the meeting of two artistic minds.