Jerome Robbins: Irving Penn at the MET
Sometime in 1948, I began photographing portraits in a small corner space made of two studio flats pushed together, the floor covered with a piece of old carpeting… a very rich series of pictures resulted. This confinement surprisingly seemed to comfort people, soothing them. The walls were a surface to lean on or push against. For me the picture possibilities were interesting; limiting the subjects’ movements seemed to relieve me of part of the problem of holding onto them.
