The exhibition that I visited at the Museum of Photographic Arts was the photography by Irving Penn. My friend works at the museum and was giving me backstory on the images. The reason the exhibition is called Beyond Beauty because in his photos he added some ugly/poison in the images. In his photo, New York Still Life, there is a perfect still life that has a bug in the image. The image, Construction and Lighting Test for New York Theatrical Producers, Penn took a self-portrait to test lighting, but it has a dreadful skull on placed right on top of his head. These little things of ugly in such beauty are inspiring. It gives you a way of seeing things out of the box. In his image, Red Rooster, he has the ugliest chicken and it was actually an advertisement for neck cream. I liked how his images created a bit of funniness behind the images, like Red Rooster and Woman with Three Children. All of Penn’s images create a unique story. In his series of cigarette photos, he took something that is full of ugliness and just thrown on the floor and created a massive image that showed texture beauty. The last image that inspired me was Girl Behind the Bottle. It took an everyday wine bottle and it made its own image. The silhouette in the background was just as intriguing to me as the simple image of the wine bottle.
Kelly Swayze Photography 