Irving Penn's 'Small Trades' at the Getty Museum

Photography has always been a craft at the intersection between art and commerce. Commerce pays the bills; art mostly doesn't. Thus some of the great modern photographers have alternated between the two as the occasion offered and the rent demanded.

A few photographers achieved what in musical circles is called crossover status, blending, as it were, high art and haute couture. The late Richard Avedon was one; the recently deceased Irving Penn (1917-2009) was another.

Avedon did unvarnished portraits against blank white backgrounds that seemed at first blush the antithesis of his fashion photography, or perhaps the penance for it, but the element of a commercial pose never quite left them. A similar effect is apparent in Irving Penn's long-running "Small Trades" series, now on view for the first time in its entirety at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and in effect a memorial exhibition, since he died after its opening.

Photography was the first art form produced by the Industrial Revolution, whose character, under the Egyptian lash of capitalism, has both created and destroyed forms of labor. Whether one's job is new or old, it is exposed, catastrophically, to the whim of the machine.

Replaced by robots

The dignity of labor is that it is not a matter of fashion, but a skill handed down from generation to generation, and that dignity shrinks, retreats, and finally vanishes in shame when technology renders it obsolete. The hostler replaced by the auto mechanic; the assembly line worker replaced by a robot; the linotypist replaced by cold type: in each case a skill, sometimes a quite delicate one, is rendered useless overnight, and so is its possessor. We are trained, now, to expect personal obsolescence, and to exchange one skill set for another over a working lifetime like a rat chasing his cheese. Not a lot of dignity in that.

Irving Penn, surveying the post-World War II world and traveling a good part of it, saw many traditional jobs under pressure. These were small service, machine, and repair jobs, typically performed by individuals or in pairs— the underbelly of the urban economy. They involved work uniforms of one sort or another— sometimes practical, sometimes symbolic— and paraphernalia strapped, wound or carried by the worker. With one's uniform and one's tool, one was ready for one's job.

Where are the glaziers?

Or one's photograph. Penn was fascinated by workers who, as it were, were display cases for their jobs, so that one could tell what they were going to do by how they looked and what they carried. He perceived an inherent dignity in this, as in 19th-Century paintings of the peasant with his hoe, and also an inherent pathos, for these small tradesmen were endangered both by mechanization and corporatization. Seen any ice deliverymen these days, or any glaziers with panes of glass strapped to their backs?

Penn posed these workers against blank studio backdrops in Paris, London and New York in the early '50s and late '60s, shot them with a Rolleiflex and developed his prints in gelatin and platinum, the former a process that leaves chemicals in suspension and the latter one that saturates the paper with chemicals. Abstracted from their urban environments, they look like what they are, representatives of a dying breed. Seen any knife grinders lately?

Even when their tasks remain— waiters are still with us— their status has subtly changed. The near-gentleman in his jacket and bib, ready to wait on persons of quality, is now the unemployed M.B.A. who greets you with his first name and tells you that he'll be your server today. Penn's waiter wouldn't have told you his name if his life depended on it, and would have been dumbstruck at the idea of announcing his function to you.

Sullen Weimar workmen

Depicting specialist workers was not, of course, a new idea, and Penn's posed tradesmen, incongruously placed against what might otherwise be a high-fashion backdrop, are fish out of water, glittering slightly with decay. These photographs certainly lack the power and gravity of August Sander's sullen Weimar workmen— who, equally isolated in their frames, fairly defy you to push them out of the way.

Suspended, for the most part, between the proletariat and the petit bourgeoisie, the pride of Penn's workers, though evident, is fragile, and their livelihoods vulnerable. Looking at them today, we know what they could only guess: that their time was almost up. As, dear reader, may be yours and mine.

Seen a newspaper vendor lately? Of course you have. But for how much longer?