![]() ![]() Here I think of his series of shrouded Moroccan women, uniformly covered, no human element to discern, and yet-somehow-the images radiate the essence of the women’s souls. Its subjects are beautifully rendered but also totally revealed. Having admired his portraits for years and then being the focus of one, I harbor the fancy that Irving Penn’s camera was also part X-ray machine and part crystal ball. Both David and I were a little stunned, and I remember murmuring, “That’s it?” Mr. We had barely been seated, with a few slight directions lightly communicated, when click, click, click, voilà, we were done. Penn was astonishingly quick with his work. Penn’s humor, prescience, and genuine kindness were utterly disarming you became a docile hunk of clay to be shaped. The atmosphere was neither austere nor surgical, just marvelously uncomplicated and calm. ![]() There was none of the usual flurry and exaggeration that so often characterizes a sitting. Penn, his long-standing, trusted editor, Phyllis Posnick, and a couple of others. In Arabic my name, Iman, means “faith.” I had faith.Īt the shoot, there were a minimum of hands on deck: just Mr. I felt I had nothing to lose, only to gain. While I was hardly confident, I was not scared. More prosaically, for protection, I also brought my five girlfriends, who stood sentinel just outside the camera’s frame. When the day of Peter’s shoot arrived, though I brought along my own face and body, these were the women whose images I summoned to bring me to life in front of the camera. My own idols came from the Arab world’s then-splendid music and movie stars, such as Umm Kulthum, Faten Hamama, and Mariam Fakhr Eddine. Growing up in eastern Africa in the 1960s and ’70s, I could not have aspired to become a fashion model even if I’d wanted to: If they existed, news of their habits never reached me at boarding school. When Peter proposed a photo session, though I could never have envisioned the trajectory it would set in motion, I could at least see negotiating a fee for the equivalent of my college tuition-and a deal was struck. There, by chance, I made the acquaintance of the rakish photographer-cum-adventurer Peter Beard. It was not, however, my first sitting that happened a year or so earlier in Kenya. In 1976, after I’d arrived in New York, aged 20, my very first modeling job was for Vogue. Peter Beard and Arthur Elgort: Beginnings ![]()
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