Moments Preserved, a Future Imagined


A still rowboat and its watery reflection, a man holding two oars in balance, and five yellow lines like a mysterious musical notation: the photograph drew me in as I looked over a table of holiday books. Browsing was my principle pleasure. Book titles and covers, even texts stacked by university course number, set off my imagination. Fifteen years old with little savings and income, I infrequently made a purchase. Browsing was enough.  Not tethered to what lay between a book’s covers, my mind could travel where whim might take it. I paged through Irving Penn’s Moments Preserved. Thirty five dollars! An improbable luxury. Later I would return with earnings to make Moments Preserved mine.

I’d not seen Irving Penn’s work before discovering Moments Preserved on the holiday book table (Vogue did not enter our home). Penn’s importance was unknown to me; the formal qualities of his photographs, his references in the still lives to Spanish masters, the aura surrounding the sky lighted studio portraits—I would learn of these later. In 1961, my sophomore high school year, I was captivated by the beauty of the photographs, entranced by the world they evoked. Penn made the art and intellectual life feel within reach.

 The circulation manager of a New York publishing company, my father offered me an occasional trip to the city. As the train approached the tunnel under the Hudson River, and I saw the tops of midtown skyscrapers, a horizon of possibilities began to edge out my humdrum life. To those who come with fresh eyes to New York, the city is “an infinity romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself,” Joan Didion writes in “Goodbye to All That.” It was this dream that Penn’s book offered me, a jejune middle-class boy living in suburban tract housing.

 I believed art and literature would carve a path out of the dull repetitions of my adolescence. When The Sunday New York Times arrived at our doorstep, I would retreat to the living room to pour over reviews of art shows and the latest novels. I added e e cummings, Frank O’Hara, and Fanny and Zooey to my family’s Book of the Month Club selections, and prided myself for having read Kafka and Camus and the Alexandrian Quartet. Jazz also widened horizons. After discovering the magazine Metronome on a New York newsstand, I became devotee, buying jazz albums as my earnings allowed and tuning in the jazz hour from a Philly radio station.  To listen again to Gerry Mulligan and the Concert Jazz Band at the Village Vanguard or Dave Brubeck’s Gone with the Wind is to call up memories of my teenage life.

Yet only Irving Penn’s Moments Preserved engenders the dreams from my 16th year. Fifty years later, when much seems irrevocable and out of reach, paging through Moments Preserved rekindles the imagination and eases the way forward, if momentarily.