And then there are the still lives—oh, those still lives! With their witty, jarring, and wholly original arrangements of the organic and the inanimate, they are as masterly and timeless as anything from 17th-century Holland. (They were also fertile ground for a ton of great stories, some of which are documented by legendary Vogue editor Phyllis Posnick, a longtime collaborator of Mr. Penn’s, in her terrific book Stoppers.)
“What has been extraordinary for me to see,” says Rosenheim, “is how with each iteration of the exhibition the story changed. He was a highly lauded artist in his lifetime. He did multiple projects. He traveled the world. In fact, the 1967 pictures are part of an extended series of global investigations of, if you will, cultures from wherever they were.” The Summer of Love images are a good example of that: Mr. Penn decamped to San Francisco, setting up a makeshift studio and inviting in the denizens of the city to sit for him. “Although he was older when he took these—he was born in 1917, so he’d be in his 50s at that point—he’s very sensitive to the rigor within those communities, of their styles and messages. And that comes through in the pictures. There’s an authenticity of their performances, of their cultures.”
