| Back Story |
 Associated Press |
| “Je refuse le prix,” Jean-Paul Sartre said on this day in 1964. |
| With these words, the French writer and philosopher, above, became the first person to freely decline the Nobel Prize. |
| But the Swedish Academy wasn’t the first to hear them. |
| A young journalist landed the scoop after tracking down Sartre at a Paris bistro. The 59-year-old “pope of existentialism” was lunching with Simone de Beauvoir, his longtime partner. |
| Interrupted before the cheese course, Sartre was stunned to hear that he had just been named the academy’s literary laureate. (A week earlier, after learning that he had been nominated for the honor, he wrote to the jury asking not be chosen. His letter didn’t arrive in time.) |
| That evening, Sartre read a statement to the Swedish press to explain why he refused the prize — and the $53,000 that came with it. |
| Official honors, he said, exposed his readers “to a pressure I do not consider desirable.” |
| The jury did not change its decision. |
| More than a decade later, Sartre, or someone related to him, allegedly asked for the money that he had turned down, according to the Swedish Academy’s former secretary. |
| This time, it was the academy that declined. |
| Lara Takenaga wrote today’s Back Story. |
Robert M. Solow 1924~2023, Groundbreaking Economist and Nobelist, Dies at 99.
So what did explain growth? Entrepreneurs? Geography? Legal institutions? Something else?
he singled out technological progress (the ability of society to translate inputs of capital and labor into outputs of goods and services)
“I discovered to my great surprise that the main source of growth was not capital investment but technological change,”
Specifically, he estimated that technical progress accounted for a surprising 80 percent of 20th-century American growth. He later pointed to Silicon Valley as a validation of his theory.
Beyond the impact of his own research, Professor Solow helped launch the careers of a stunning number of future superstar economists, including four Nobel laureates: Peter Diamond, Joseph E. Stiglitz, William D. Nordhaus and George A. Akerlof. “My pride and joy,” Professor Solow said.
“All his former students idolize him — all, with no exceptions.”
“I was given the office next to Paul Samuelson’s,” he recounted in the publication Les Prix Nobel. “Thus began what is now almost 40 years of almost daily conversations about economics, politics, our children, cabbages and kings.”
The Solow growth model, propounded in his book “A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth,” in 1956, and its empirical follow-up, “Technical Change and the Aggregate Production Function,” published in 1957, made his reputation while he was in his early 30s and led in due course to the Clark Medal and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
he reveals a fundamental difficulty with the role of philosopher-king. It is too damn hard.
the living conditions of low-wage workers were better in Europe because of a more generous social-safety net there, along with rules that provided workers with greater bargaining power.
His elegant work established that the main determinant of economic growth was technology, not growing capital and labor.
Robert M. Solow, who won a Nobel in economic science in 1987 for his theory that advances in technology, rather than increases in capital and labor, have been the primary drivers of economic growth in the United States, died on Thursday at his home in Lexington, Mass. He was 99.
米国の写真家アービング・ペンさんが７日、ニューヨークの自宅で死去した。９２歳。ファッション誌「ヴォーグ」の表紙を手がけるなど、２０世紀で最も影響力のある写真家として知られた。死因は明らかにされていない。複数の米メディアが伝えた。
ニュージャージー州出身。画家を目指したが、雑誌のデザイナーに。たまたま撮った写真が４３年のヴォーグの表紙を飾り、評価を受ける。簡素な構図を発展させて、写真を芸術の領域に引き上げたといわれる。（ニューヨーク）
Irving Penn, one of the 20th century’s most prolific and influential photographers of fashion and the famous, whose signature blend of classical elegance and cool minimalism was recognizable to magazine readers and museumgoers worldwide, died Wednesday morning at his home in Manhattan. He was 92.
The latest on the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia extravaganzas and much more. Join the discussion.
Irving Penn's “Woman With Roses,” with Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn in Lafaurie Dress, Paris, 1950.
His death was announced by Peter MacGill, his friend and representative.
Mr. Penn’s talent for picturing his subjects with compositional clarity and economy earned him the widespread admiration of readers of Vogue during his long association with the magazine, beginning in 1943. It also brought him recognition in the art world; his photographs have been exhibited in museums and galleries and are prized by collectors.
His long career at Vogue spanned a number of radical transformations in fashion and its depiction, but his style remained remarkably constant. Imbued with calm and decorum, his photographs often seemed intent on defying fashion. His models and portrait subjects were never seen leaping or running or turning themselves into blurs. Even the rough-and-ready members of the Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang, photographed in San Francisco in 1967, were transformed within the quieting frame of his studio camera into the graphic equivalent of a Greek frieze.
Instead of spontaneity, Mr. Penn provided the illusion of a seance, his gaze precisely describing the profile of a Balenciaga coat or of a Moroccan jalaba in a way that could almost mesmerize the viewer. Nothing escaped the edges of his photographs unless he commanded it. Except for a series of close-up portraits that cut his subjects’ heads off at the forehead, and another, stranger suite of overripe nudes, his subjects were usually shown whole, apparently enjoying a splendid isolation from the real world.
He was probably most famous for photographing Parisian fashion models and the world’s great cultural figures, but he seemed equally at home photographing Peruvian peasants or bunion pads. Merry Foresta, co-organizer of a 1990 retrospective of his work at the National Museum of American Art, wrote that his pictures exhibited “the control of an art director fused with the process of an artist.”
A courtly man whose gentle demeanor masked an intense perfectionism, Mr. Penn adopted the pose of a humble craftsman while helping to shape a field known for putting on airs. Although schooled in painting and design, he chose to define himself as a photographer, scraping his early canvases of paint so that they might serve a more useful life as backdrops to his pictures.
He was also a refined conversationalist and a devoted husband and friend. His marriage to Lisa Fonssagrives, a beautiful model, artist and his sometime collaborator, lasted 42 years, ending with her death at the age of 80 in 1992. Mr. Penn’s photographs of Ms. Fonssagrives not only captured a slim woman of lofty sophistication and radiant good health; they also set the esthetic standard for the elegant fashion photography of the 1940s and ’50s.
Ms. Fonssagrives became a sculptor after her modeling career ended. In 1994, Mr. Penn and their son, Tom, a metal designer, arranged the printing of a book that reproduced his wife’s sculpture, prints and drawings. In addition to his son, Mr. Penn is survived by his stepdaughter, Mia Fonssagrives Solow, a sculptor and jewelry designer; his younger brother, Arthur, the well-known director of such films as “Bonnie and Clyde,” and eight grandchildren.
Mr. Penn had the good fortune of working for and collaborating with two of the 20th century’s most inventive and influential magazine art directors, Alexey Brodovitch and Alexander Liberman. He studied with Mr. Brodovitch in Philadelphia as a young man and came to New York in 1937 as his unpaid design assistant at Harper’s Bazaar, the most provocative fashion magazine of the day. But it was under Mr. Liberman, at Vogue, that Mr. Penn forged his career as a photographer.
In the book “Irving Penn: Passage” (1991), a compilation of the photographer’s career, Mr. Liberman wrote of meeting Mr. Penn for the first time in 1941: “Here was a young American who seemed unspoiled by European mannerisms or culture. I remember he wore sneakers and no tie. I was struck by his directness and a curious unworldliness, a clarity of purpose, and a freedom of decision. What I call Penn’s American instincts made him go for the essentials.”
Irving Penn was also a consummate technician, known equally for the immaculate descriptive quality of his still-life arrangements of cosmetics and other consumer goods and for his masterly exploration of photographic materials. Not content with the conventions of the darkroom or with the standard appearance of commercial prints, he was willing to experiment. He resorted to bleaching the prints of his nudes series, eliminating skin tones and making female flesh appear harsh and unforgiving but nonetheless sexually charged.
At the height of the cultural convulsions of the 1960s Mr. Penn taught himself to print his own pictures using a turn-of-the-century process that relies on platinum instead of more conventional silver. The process produces beautiful, velvety tones in the image and is among the most permanent of photographic processes, although it requires time-consuming preparation and precise control in the darkroom.
Over the next 30 years Mr. Penn labored to print all his new work, as well as to reprint much of his earlier work, using this platinum process, which requires that a photographer mix a recipe of exotic chemicals and then hand-coat them onto a sheet of drawing paper. Mr. Penn, who almost single-handedly brought the process back into popularity among photographic artists, perfected a method of coating the paper with multiple layers of metallic salts, greatly increasing the depth and luminosity of the final print.
Mr. Penn’s concern with the longevity of his prints was one aspect of an enduring career. Not only was he the photographer with the longest tenure in the history of Condé Nast, which publishes Vogue; he also created timeless images of fashion and celebrity, two arenas characterized by constant change. At the same time, he took pains to acknowledge mortality and decay in his photographs, focusing his more personal work on cigarette butts, sidewalk detritus and, while in his 70s, on the skulls of wild animals.
In his catalog essay for a 1984 retrospective of Mr. Penn’s work at the Museum of Modern Art, John Szarkowski, then the museum’s director of photography, wrote, “The grace, wit, and inventiveness of his pattern-making, the lively and surprising elegance of his line, and his sensitivity to the character, the idiosyncratic humors, of light make Penn’s pictures, even the slighter ones, a pleasure for our eyes.”
Irving Penn was born June 16, 1917, in Plainfield, N. J. His father, Harry, was a watchmaker and his mother, Sonia, a nurse. As a student at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art, later to be known as the Philadelphia College of Art (and now the University of the Arts), from 1934 to 1938, Mr. Penn studied drawing, painting and graphic and industrial design. His most influential teacher was the designer Alexey Brodovitch, a Russian émigré by way of Paris who was familiar with vanguard developments in European art and design.
Although Mr. Brodovitch worked in New York City for Harper’s Bazaar, he traveled to Philadelphia on Saturdays to meet with his students and to evaluate their work. Mr. Penn’s graphic talent impressed Mr. Brodovitch, and he chose him to be his unpaid assistant at Bazaar during the summers of 1937 and 1938.
After finishing school and moving to New York, Mr. Penn worked as a free-lance designer and illustrator for Bazaar and other clients. He also bought a camera and began to photograph storefronts and signs he saw in Manhattan. In 1940 he inherited Mr. Brodovitch’s position as director of advertising design for the Saks Fifth Avenue department store, but within a year he decided to travel to Mexico and attempt a career as a painter.
Before leaving for Mexico Mr. Penn, at Mr. Brodovitch’s suggestion, offered his position at Saks to another Russian émigré designer, Alexander Liberman. Mr. Liberman declined, but by the time Mr. Penn returned to New York in 1943, with his canvases scraped totally clean, Mr. Liberman was the art director of Vogue, and he returned the younger man’s favor by offering Mr. Penn a job as his assistant.
Mr. Penn’s first assignment was to supervise the design of Vogue’s covers, and he obliged by sketching out several possible photographic scenes. Unable to interest any of the staff photographers in taking them, he took to the photo studio himself, at Mr. Liberman’s suggestion. The first result of this opportunity was a color still-life photograph of a glove, belt and pocketbook, which was published as the cover of Vogue’s Oct. 1, 1943, issue. Mr. Penn’s photographs would appear on more than 150 Vogue covers over the next 50 years.
During World War II, Mr. Penn joined the American Field Service and drove an ambulance in Italy, where he got a taste of European culture. Arriving in Rome in 1944, he spied the artist Giorgio de Chirico carrying a shopping bag of vegetables home from the market.
“I rushed up and embraced him,” Mr. Penn recalled in “Passage,” the 1991 compilation of his life’s work. “To me he was the heroic de Chirico; to him I was a total stranger, probably demented. Still, he was moved and said, come home and have lunch with us. For two days he showed me his Rome.”
During those two days Mr. Penn made his first black-and-white portraits, beginning what would become a celebrated archive of the leading artists, writers and performers of the second half of the 20th century.
Returning to Vogue in 1946 as a staff photographer, Mr. Penn went on to fill the magazine’s pages with portraits of cultural figures like Edmund Wilson and W. H. Auden, still lifes of accessories and graphic fashion photographs. His 1947 image “Twelve of the Most Photographed Models of the Period,” a group portrait, includes, at its center, Lisa Fonssagrives.
Ms. Fonssagrives would later appear in some of Mr. Penn’s most memorable fashion images, among them “Rochas ‘Mermaid Dress,’ Paris” and “Woman with Roses, Paris,” both taken in 1950, the year she became his wife.
Those pictures were made during Mr. Penn’s first assignment to photograph the Paris collections for Vogue. Using a discarded theater curtain for a backdrop and a borrowed studio filled with daylight, he choreographed some of the most spare and delicate fashion photographs yet produced, treating the clothes less as dresses to be worn than as shapes to be perceived in silhouette.
Unlike Richard Avedon, the other important new fashion photographer of the postwar period, Mr. Penn expressed himself and his subjects best through a Shaker-style restraint. In 1948, for example, he began to pose his portrait subjects by wedging them between two plain walls that met in a sharply angled vee, a scene offset only by a scrap of fraying carpet, on which subjects as prominent as Spencer Tracy, Joe Louis and the Duchess of Windsor stood, crouched or leaned.
The same year, while on assignment for Vogue in Peru, Mr. Penn ventured on his own to Cuzco and photographed the exotically dressed families who lived in the mountainous countryside, presenting them nonjudgmentally.
Two decades later he expanded on these portraits during trips to Dahomey (now called Benin), to Morocco, to New Guinea and elsewhere, using a portable studio to provide a textured but seamless background. The pictures, in color as well as black and white, were featured annually in Vogue. In 1974 they were published in a book, “Worlds in a Small Room,” which seemed to emphasize the perseverance of cultural diversity.
Mr. Penn was also capable of making Western culture seem strange and fascinating. In the early 1950s he made a series of portraits of small tradesmen (“Petit Métiers,” in French) working in Paris, London and New York. Again relying on his spare studio to separate his subjects from their surroundings, he nevertheless insisted that the tradesmen wear the clothes and tools of their work: two pastry chiefs in white aprons and toches hold rolling pins; a fishmonger carries a fish in one hand and a rag in the other.
In 1949 and 1950, Mr. Penn produced images of female nudes as a personal project, using fleshy artists’ models and focusing exclusively on their torsos. In the process of printing he attacked the light-sensitive paper with bleach and other chemicals to remove most of the skin tones, creating a rough chiaroscuro effect antithetical to then-prevailing notions of corporeal beauty. These unsettling pictures were not exhibited or published until 30 years later, in 1980, when the Marlborough Gallery mounted a show called “Earthly Bodies.” The critic Rosalind Krauss, writing in the catalog, called the nudes “a kind of privately launched and personally experienced kamikaze attack on his own public identity as a photographer of fashion.”
The quest to undercut fashion’s standards of perfection, and to find beauty in the disdained, overlooked or overripe, runs throughout Mr. Penn’s career. In an otherwise pristine still life of food, he included a house fly, and in a 1959 close-up, he placed a beetle in a model’s ear. From 1967 to 1973 he produced color essays of flowers, published each year in Vogue’s Christmas issue; in each case the blooms are past their prime, their leaves wilted, tinged with brown and falling.
Mr. Penn acquired a reputation for perfectionism at all costs. In the book “Passage,” Mr. Liberman recounts that when Mr. Penn was asked to take a picture of glasses falling from a serving tray, the photographer insisted that for authenticity’s sake Baccarat crystal be used. The art director ruefully remembered that several dozens of the glasses were shattered before the photograph was made to Mr. Penn’s standard.
In the mid-1960s, just as Mr. Penn began to be consumed by his experiments with platinum printing, fashion and fashion photography switched gears decisively. Neither his style nor his manner matched the era’s spirit of sexual liberation and spontaneous, sometimes drug-assisted creativity. The public image of a fashion photographer came to be exemplified by the anything-goes protagonist of Michelangelo Antonioni’s film “Blow Up,” played by David Hemming.
Mr. Penn observed the rebelliousness of the ’60s with a curious eye, even taking an assignment from Look magazine to photograph the “summer of love” scene in San Francisco. But his stylistic confidence seemed to falter when it came to portraying the minimally structured garments and ultra-thin models of the time. His photograph of the model Marisa Berenson, wearing a breast-plate-size peace sign and little else, suggests the photographer’s ambivalence about an era in which no clothes often seemed the preferable fashion. Not surprisingly, he concentrated on producing photographs intended to be viewed as art.
In 1975, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a small exhibition of his recent work printed using the platinum process: a series of greatly magnified images of cigarette butts. Transformed from gutter discards to iconic status, the mashed and bent cylinders again showed Mr. Penn’s penchant for straying far from the politesse of his fashion and portrait pictures. The cigarette butts were followed by a series focused on other forms of sidewalk debris, including flattened paper cups, deli containers and rags; these photographs, presented in platinum, were exhibited by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1977 in a show called “Street Material.”
As a result of the two museum exhibitions, Mr. Penn’s work played a significant role in the rise of photography’s fortunes in the art world. In the late 1970s and early 1980s his pictures were exhibited several times at the Marlborough Gallery in New York. In 1984 a 160-print traveling retrospective of his career was organized by Szarkowski. Since 1987 his pictures have been exhibited on a regular basis at the Pace/MacGill Gallery, which now represents his work.
Passing the age of 65 without a thought of retirement, Mr. Penn devoted himself increasingly to still-lifes, on assignments for Vogue and for advertising clients like Clinique cosmetics, and in photographs for exhibition. On his own time he constructed arrangements of bones, steel blocks and bleached animal skulls. These table-top compositions recall Dutch vanitas still-lifes as well as Giorgio Morandi paintings. At the same time, Mr. Penn produced several memorable portraits for Vogue of older artists of his own generation, like Willem de Kooning, Isamu Noguchi and Italo Calvino, and began contributing portraits to the fledgling Condé Nast magazine Vanity Fair. In 1985 he began to draw and paint again, after a hiatus of 43 years.
A collection of many of his most important images, in a variety of genres, was acquired jointly by the National Portrait Gallery and the National Museum of American Art in 1990; the museums, both branches of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, also mounted an exhibition of the collection titled “Irving Penn: Master Images.” In its first foray into modern photography, the Morgan Library & Museum in New York acquired 67 of Penn’s portraits in 2007 and exhibited them last year. Another major show opened in September at the J. Paul Getty Museum of Los Angeles.
In 1996 Mr. Penn donated the bulk of his archives and 130 of his prints to the Chicago Art Institute. An exhibition of these prints, “Irving Penn: A Career in Photography,” organized by Colin Westerbeck, opened at the Art Institute the following year and subsequently toured the country. In 2005 the National Gallery in Washington mounted a smaller retrospective of Penn’s career that consisted entirely of his platinum prints.
The critic Richard Woodward, writing in 1990, argued that Mr. Penn would be best remembered for the work he did for the museum wall, not the printed page. “The steely unity of Irving Penn’s career, the severity and constructed rigor of his work can best be appreciated when he seems to break away from the dictates of fashion for magazines,” he wrote. “Only then is it clear how everything he photographs — or, at least, prints — is the product of a remarkably undivided conscience. There are no breaks; only different subjects.”
延伸閱讀：
延伸聆聽：
追蹤《報導者Podcast》IG：twreporter_podcast贊助《報導者》：https://pse.is/5953dg序：春蠶到死絲方盡
為朱耀明牧師新書《敲鐘者言》（台北：左岸，2023）寫的序
————————
朱牧師大情大性，笑容常帶童真，但眼淚也不少。
在雨傘運動期間，他總是坐在佔領區的一角，含著淚水看那些朝氣蓬勃的年輕人在做抗爭工藝品、聽演說、聊天。我知道六四陰影在他心中徘徊不散，日夜煎熬何時可讓學生平安退場。
如果當年不是早一天要回港主持婚禮，他應該會在天安門廣場上跟學生一起倉皇逃命。又或者那是上帝的安排，要他平安在海外開展「黃雀行動」，讓百計中國民運人士逃出生天。那是多麽驚心動魄的歴程，可惜在這書中只能化作串串方格，靜待時日光復，讀者才能看到。
朱牧師投身支聯會和其後爭取普選的工作，與他和已故的司徒華先生結緣有關。司徒華看準神職人員的道德力量，希望藉朱牧師感召一群學者、社工等專業人士，在政黨以外凝聚一股爭取民主的清流。司徒華自己亦歸信基督，而在人生最後階段，朱牧師從醫院至安德烈教堂均陪他走過。
朱牧師感召力之強大，往往是一個電話便打亂了你的人生。
大學時期我算是虔誠的基督徒，卻不屑教會把福音銷在溫馨的小盒之中，對外面世界的不公不聞不問。碰巧一次機會聽到盧龍光和朱耀明兩位牧師講道，提出信仰應與社區結合，可謂醍醐灌頂。結果我在大學最後一個暑假走進兩位牧師服務的柴灣，做了一個醫療問題的研究，並且捲入了爭取興建醫院運動，與朱牧師結緣。
我從事社區組織工作幾年後便出國進修，一九九三年回到中文大學一面任教、一面撰寫博士論文。那段日子港人受前途問題困擾，我知道自己回歸香港，是要在日後爭取民主，只是想先取得正教授職位後，才全力投入公共事務。
這個如意算盤卻被朱牧師徹底擾亂。從化解居民對九龍灣愛滋病診所的抗拒、成立民主發展網絡爭普選到投入佔領中環運動，他都是撥了一通電話便把我從繁忙的教研工作中帶到社運的前線。無他，牧師吩咐的都是行公義、好憐憫之事，我當然要「存謙卑的心與神同行」。
與牧師共事了三十多年，合作無間。大家都嚴守組織紀律，不洩密、不斂財、不計個人榮辱。我佩服牧師的勇氣，不惜與同袍衝突反對基督教慶祝國慶、更以身犯險佔領中環，反駁教內「當順服掌權者」的謬誤。當然，我亦看到牧師脆弱的一面。童年以至六四的陰影，再加上年老多病，很難要求他在囹圄中抗爭。
因此，在審訊雨傘運動的最後階段，我雖極力反對向法官求情，甚至阻止呈上社會服務紀錄（因為我們應以一個普通公民的身分代表過百萬曾參與佔領的市民面對審訊），但最終我還是要求律師代我和戴耀廷向法庭求請，免朱牧師𠄘受牢獄之苦。但當牧師在法庭上帶淚朗讀他的〈敲鐘者言〉陳情書，他還是堅決表示不後悔，旁聽席上飲泣聲不絕。
結果我和另外三位被告被判入獄，朱牧師和其他四位被告被判緩刑或社會服務令。法官在判詞中讚揚牧師人格正直、服務社會多年，而且年邁體弱，不宜判處即時入獄。當我和其他被告由囚車押解至監獄時，看到牧師在法庭門外老淚縱橫哭別我們，內心難過，亦明白他既悲傷亦歉疚於無法一起背上十字架。
其實牧師大可釋懐。他除了牧養一間教會以外，還從零開始建立起學前教育和社會服務及醫療中心。在成功爭取東區醫院以後，一直參與醫療服務包括東區醫院管理委員會、醫管局病人投訴委員會和關懷愛滋病的紅絲帶中心。他亦推動成立或管理互愛戒毒中心、協助更生人士的豐盛社會企業和完美句號殯儀服務。他協助創立的民主組織包括基督徒愛國民主運動、香港民主發展網絡、香港公民教育基金會、守護公義基金、讓愛與和平佔領中環，還有他耗盡心力的黃雀行動。朱牧師投身公共服務的拼勁，就像他老師周聯華牧師所言，為了完成基督徒的使命，蠟燭兩頭燒亦在所不惜。我卻想到：春蠶吐絲，至死方休。
朱牧師在佔中以後，一直過著平淡的退休生活。他說早上坐在教會宿舍的窗邊吃一碗小米粥，是他最幸福的時光。但香港實施《國安法》後，為了他和其他人的安全，我力勸他及早離開。結果他在台灣國立政治大學出任訪問學人，期間完成此書。通過此書，大家可讀到一個人如何忠於自己的信仰，從失去父母的街童掙扎成為力行公義的牧師。通過他，亦同時看到香港社會的滄桑變化。
因為流散在外，因為思念被囚寃獄的老友，我常見牧師眼泛淚光、嗌聲嘆氣。難道真是「蠟炬成灰淚始乾」？只望公義快臨，牧師可以回到故居吃他喜歡的小米粥。
Post a Comment on ArtsBeat