January 3, 2012 |
Most of the readers of 10 are well aware of who Irving Penn and Issey Miyake are, but just in case somebody has bought the magazine at the newsstand judging it, by its title, to be a magazine devoted to mathematics and numeracy, let’s explain. Penn is the world-famous photographer who died just under two years ago and Miyake is the pioneering Japanese fashion designer who is, happily, still very much with us. And we are talking about them because of the current exhibition (details below) devoted to a collaboration between the two that lasted for 13 years.
But it was not a collaboration in the sense we normally think of. More a long-distance love affair without words, separated by the thousands of miles between New York and Tokyo. Miyake provided the clothes and Penn photographed them. So? Nothing very unexpected about that, surely? Well, in fact, there is. This very close relationship – a serious working relationship – was carried out without the two meeting or even talking about it. And, yes, you are not alone. I think that is pretty cool – even zen – as well.
This collaboration is one of those rare things in fashion – a marriage made in heaven, the coming together of two kindred minds that view the world from different points of view but search for, and find, common ground. The very first thing that strikes you is the way in which they each see. Penn was always a particularist who isolated his subject in order to give it the concentrated exposure that forces the viewer to look deeply not merely at the image – be it a ball gown, a squashed cigarette end picked up from the gutter or a beauty product (even a can of white paint precisely placed against a white background once for a Ralph Lauren advertisement) – but at its mass and volume in relation to the space around it.
Are you beginning to see where the similarities come from?
Let’s think about Miyake. Isn’t his clothing all about the precision of an eye that sees clothes not solely in relation to the body inside but also to the air around that body? In the last book Penn did for him, Irving Penn Regards the Work of Issey Miyake, published nearly 12 years ago – one of the great books of fashion photography – every image is shot against a stark, white background. The result is unique. These two amazing men together have taken clothes, placed them in a neutral, even antiseptically pure, space and made a third element. They have created a human geometry of silhouette, shape and weight that pushes the image to the very edge of its existence, where it hovers. Any further and you feel it would shatter into a thousand tiny pieces.
And all done with a tremendous sense of movement but also a uniquely Japanese sense of frozen motion and time that brings a feeling of deep silence. And completeness, like the spit second when Nureyev was at the highest point of his jeté and seemed to be frozen still for the blink of an eye. Unbelievable as it may seem, it was totally a fact yet over so fast the audience did not have time to even gasp before it was gone and he was on his way back to the stage. A god no more, but never to be forgotten by those who witnessed it. Penn’s pictures have the same heart-stopping uniqueness. Penn and Miyake, with their own totally personal rearrangement for us of how clothes can be seen, worn and perceived in a still picture, create something as full of exciting, challenging movement as the greatest split seconds of a perfect ballet performance.
But these are a photographer and a designer with wide cultural reference points and, as with all clothing, they are conscious of their inevitable indebtedness to sculpture. And there is a sculptural aspect to the clothes, not in a heavy or monumental way, but in the way of Brancusi or the brightly coloured joyous work of Isamu Noguchi. And joyous is the word for this unique and now-silenced collaboration between East and West. If you are looking for a little joy in life, get yourself to Japan for this very special event and prepare to return a little changed, a little heightened and a lot more visually aware than you are now.
Irving Penn and Issey Miyake: Visual Dialogue, Until 8th April 2012 at 21_21 Design Sight, Tokyo, Japan
by Colin Mcdowell
