Tamasin Day-Lewis on the Irving Penn Portrait of Her Father, Poet Cecil Day-Lewis
By
Tamasin Day-Lewis
Summary
Tamasin Day-Lewis reflects on a 1950s Irving Penn portrait of her father, poet laureate Cecil Day-Lewis, exploring the gap between the public figure and the private man she knew. The photograph captures him in his late 40s—handsome, successful, and still a stranger in many ways to his daughter, who was born later in his life. The piece meditates on memory, the limits of knowing a parent, and the stories that remain untold even within families.
Source
Twitter / XTamasin Day-Lewis on the Irving Penn Portrait of Her Father, Poet Cecil Day-Lewisvogue.comKey quotes
· 3 pulledThe past is a foreign country, L. P. Hartley wrote at the beginning of his great novel, The Go-Between. And that is what strikes me each time I look at this photograph of my father, the man I knew in some ways so well, in other ways not at all.
He had already lived the major part of his life before I was a gleam in his eye and his past was something I would only hear about in the edited-
This portrait, by Irving Penn, reminds her of everything she knew about him—and much that she didn't.
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