Pace Gallery’s current exhibition of Irving Penn’s photographs from the ‘40s to 2000, curated by supremely image-savvy artist Hank Willis Thomas, is compact but impactful, featuring juxtapositions of photos with often radically different subject matter that nevertheless have some affinity. A 1947 studio portrait of New Yorker cartoonists poised on a scaffold hangs near a photo of a careful arrangement of blocks, immediately conveying careful arrangement and balance rather than humor or play. Around the corner, two models in Issey Miyake echo the form of a neighboring image of two weathered cigarette butts, a parallel that crashes together the fashionable and the discarded. Hung on gallery walls constructed to recall the temporary structures Penn used as sets, photos are positioned near each other but on different walls, similar yet different. Here, tangled members of a wrestling family appear opposite an arrangement of seafood, both shot in 1948, demonstrating the ‘visual muscle memory’ that Willis Thomas argues ties together Penn’s 70-year career. (On view in Chelsea through Dec 21st).
