Welcome to The Director’s Cut, an interactive column featuring fashion, beauty and career advice from RGNN Director and Founder, @isabelevabohrer.
Joyfully chatting amongst one another, a group of little kids was heading, some almost skipping, towards the entrance. Another equally content group of school kids was just exiting, waving goodbye on their way out. Exiting what? The “Irving Penn: Centennial” exhibition at the Marta Ortega Pérez Foundation (MOP Foundation) in A Coruña, Spain.
The kids – it’s the least lucrative aspect of the MOP Foundation, but its most essential pillar, according to Marta Ortega, President of Inditex. What’s the point of showcasing fashion photography, or of anything for that matter, if you don’t train the next generation? The kids are here not only to see Penn’s photos, but to learn photography techniques first-hand.
Specifically, as you will see in the visuals, they, like any other visitor, started the visit by entering the recreation of the portable photography studio that Penn was so notorious for. Architect Elsa Urquijo, another local of A Coruña, has once again created an structure solely for the purpose of the exhibition (when we were here less than a year ago, it was stark white, reflecting the light of the ocean, in line with Helmut Newton’s love of the ocean). The now black and white tent-like structure is ephemeral, but there are novelties at the MOP Foundation that are not.
In addition to becoming a point of reference for fashion photography exhibitions worldwide, the MOP Foundation now also seeks to become a hub for consulting fashion photography history. How? With the inauguration of its library (and first acquisitions of photography book collections), housed in one of the silos, where the museum store was previously located. The photos and videos hardly do the library justice – a part of me reminisced about the Guggenheim in New York City, my eyes spiraling up and up the winding stairs.
But that’s not all. The exhibition space at the port used to be temporary. From now on, however, it will be open year-round, with rotating exhibitions that include household names, as now Penn, and during the summer, the very same students that the MOP Foundation gives scholarships to to study photography.
It’s a permanent reason to come back to A Coruña, and what made us, like so many others, travel there to see the Irving Penn exhibition. Specifically, the centennial is created in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Irving Penn Foundation. Organized chronologically, you can vicariously experience the prolific work of Penn throughout the years – after all, he dedicated 70(!) years of his life to photography, and is the only photographer to have shot 165 covers of Vogue magazine. Anna Wintour always wanted him.
Why? Because he is the photographer of the soul. Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Truman Capote, Yves Saint Laurent, Audrey Hepburn, the list goes on and on, and not to forget, supermodel and his later wife Lisa Fonssagrives…Penn photographed them all, and always in interiors. A single security guard watches over what is the most treasured piece in the exhibition; the original theater curtain found for Penn in Paris in 1950 and that he used as a backdrop on so many occasions. Oh, if theater curtains could talk, the stories this one could tell.
You can’t touch the curtain, but you can step inside a recreation of one of Penn’s other scenarios – a magazine-like structure of two walls. Take your time, step inside and just be you, Penn would tell his subjects. And no person ever adopted the same position, as the photos tell.
Just like Elsa Schiaparelli and so many others – striking a pose inside a replica of Penn’s magazine-like structure of two walls | Photo credits: RGNN.org
The zenith of the photographer-subject synergy, though, comes with Issey Miyake. I am what I am, thanks to Penn, Miyake would often say. The Japanese native would send Penn his clothes, and it was the photographer who brought them to life. As he did with other objects, objects that others throw out and never think of again. Case in point: Penn’s infamous cigarette series, what the Metropolitan Museum of Art dedicated his first-ever eponymous exhibition to.
Penn’s interpretations of Issey Miyake’s creations | Photo credits: RGNN.org
Everything can be transformed into art, into photography. And photography, fashion, and A Coruña, those are the three aspects the MOP Foundation aspired to promote from its outset – with success. The kids left, almost skipping. And so did I, eager to come back to the beauty that is Galicia again.
Plan your visit
Marta Ortega Pérez Foundation.
- Muelle de Batería s/n. 15006 A Coruña.
- Pedestrian entrance through Entrejardines.
- Monday through Thursday: 10.00 a.m. to 8.00 p.m.
- Fridays: 10.00 a.m. to 9.00 p.m.
- Saturdays and Sundays: 11.00 a.m. to 9.00 p.m.
- Admission is free.
- A guided tour (highly recommended) can be booked for 5 Euros per person.
- “Irving Penn: Centennial” will be on view until May 1, 2025.
More information on the official website here.
Thank you to the Marta Ortega Pérez Foundation for inviting us.
Questions or comments? Follow me on IG @isabelevabohrer or TikTok and say hi! See you soon!
