Sitting Man with Pink Face, New Guinea 1970

Irving Penn made this photograph in New Guinea of a man sitting cross-legged, with feathers attached to his shoulders and arms. His face is painted in an ambiguous way. He is wearing some kind of mask. I wonder what it was like to be Penn in this moment, making pictures of people with these costumes and makeup. It feels like Penn wanted to capture something authentic, but of course, photography is never neutral. It always involves choices, framing, and what to include or exclude. It's about what the photographer is thinking, what the subject is willing to reveal, and how those two intentions come together. Painters have always been inspired by photographs, using them as source material, and now photographers are in conversation with painting too, thinking about composition, surface, and how to capture something that feels both real and made up.