Hippie Family (Ferguson), San Francisco 1967

Irving Penn made this black and white photograph in San Francisco; it’s called Hippie Family. I think it’s amazing how a photograph can both capture a specific moment in time, and somehow point to something timeless. Looking at this image, I imagine Penn setting up his camera, maybe feeling like an outsider looking in at this family. What’s it like to make a portrait of someone else? It's a bit like painting, figuring out how to translate what you see and feel onto a surface. The light in the photo creates a beautiful texture, almost like the surface of a painting, with all these different shades and tones. The careful attention to detail in the image, like the texture of the mother’s hair, or the rings on the father’s fingers, are really very painterly. You see this attention to texture and detail in other photographers’ work, like Diane Arbus for example. The hippies here may have seen themselves as outside the norms of society, but Penn, by photographing them, puts them right into the ongoing conversation of art.