Mud Glove (Street Material IV), New York

This version of Penn's Mud Glove, 1975 was used as the four-part entrance poster for his 1977 exhibition "Street Material: Photographs in Platinum Metals 1975-76" at The Metropolitan Muusem of Art. As Merry Foresta observes in Master Images, after many year of focusing on fashion work, Penn turned to making studies of debris. "Without doubt Penn's methods are extreme. What could be further from the clean, glossy look of fashion than all the rough oddities emerging from an enlargement of murky detail in a lost glove found in the gutter, or a tossed-off cigarette butt in the street? Through long, meticulous experiment, coating paper himself, Penn perfected a command of platinum printing in order to bring even greater richness and clarity to his image. His use of a small amount of precious metals to render garbage valuable is a self-critical comment akin to the participatory handmade sense that only a few years earlier had validated the work of artists such as Jasper Johns and Jim Dine." (op. cit., p. 11.)