Irving Penn

platinum-palladium print, flush-mounted to aluminum, signed, titled, dated, numbered '29/35,' and with technical, edition, and copyright information by the photographer in pencil and with his Condé Nast copyright and edition stamps on the reverse, matted, 1970, printed in 1976, no. 29 in an edition of 35 in platinum metals

Acquired by the present owner from Marlborough Gallery, New York, 1977

Other prints of this image:

Irving Penn, Worlds in a Small Room (New York, 1974), p. 56

Irving Penn, Passage: A Work Record (New York, 1991), rear dust jacket and p. 193

Irving Penn: Photographs in Platinum Metals, Images 1947 - 1975 (Marlborough Gallery, 1977, in conjunction with the exhibition), unpaginated

Sarah Greenough, Irving Penn: Platinum Prints (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C., and Yale University Press, New Haven, 2005, in conjunction with the exhibition), pl. 55

Colin Westerbeck, ed., Irving Penn: A Career in Photography (The Art Institute of Chicago, 1997, in conjunction with the exhibition), pl. 31

Ben Maddow, Faces (Boston, 1977), p. 398

This multiply-coated print, on BF360 paper, is in generally excellent condition. In the margins on the recto, there are faint lines from the mat edges. Also, at the top margin edge, there is a strip of abrasion approximately ½-inch long. On the reverse, there are four approximately 6½-by-½-inch strips of brown paper tape that were used in the original matting of the photograph at Marlborough Gallery.
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Asaro Mudmen is among the best-known images from Irving Penn's series Worlds in a Small Room.  For this group of photographs, Penn brought his expert eye for costume and setting, along with his unmatched skills in lighting and composition, to bear on subject matter far different from the high-fashion models he more typically photographed.  Traveling the world with a portable studio, Penn photographed ethnic and cultural groups as diverse as New Guinea tribesman; villagers in Dahomey, Africa; San Francisco hippies; Indians of Cuzco, Peru; Moroccan shepherds; and tradespeople from London, Paris, and New York.  Asaro Mudmen is the lead-off image in the New Guinea section of Penn's book of this series, and his caption for the photograph reads as follows:

'Makehuku men from the village of Mandow near Goroka, known generally as the mud men of Asaro.  They wear masks of gray mud sculpted over cane frames; the masks recall a battle in which their remote ancestors, driven into a river by an enemy tribe, emerged mud-covered.  Their attackers, thinking them evil spirits, turned and ran.'

This photograph comes from the collection of the photographer Michael O'Neill, who purchased it from Marlborough Gallery's 1977 exhibition Irving Penn: Photographs in Platinum Metals—Images 1947-1975.  This exhibition was the first large-scale public offering of Penn's platinum work.  O'Neill began his career assisting professional photographers and managed Hiro's studio in the 1970s.  He worked variously as a still-life photographer and a television director before becoming one of the top celebrity photographers from the 1980s to the current decade.  His work has been published in Vanity Fair, Fortune, Rolling Stone, Life, Glamour, GQ, and numerous other magazines.  He has long appreciated the art of platinum printing—hence his interest in Irving Penn—and of his own work has produced a number of editions of platinum prints, including images of Venice and baby animals.   He is currently working on a book about the world of yoga.