At first glance, this Irving Penn photo looks like it could be its own tarot card. The careful black figures dressed so elegantly in hats and a veil, their hands gloved, seem like mourners, a young widow receiving a reading from a friend or relative after the funeral, their black forms against the white like a calligraphy brushstroke. The setting suggests a parlor where this kind of fortune-telling happens often, a ritual space, though the two figures seem dressed for an event they have either left or will go to next. The tarot reader holds the cards as if she is making an urgent point to the querent, who listens with deep absorption. The cards are almost legible.
There is no Fortune Teller card in the tarot, though perhaps there should be–and it might look a lot like this photo. The card for luck or chance is called Fortune or the Wheel of Fortune, a card that urges either reflection that bad times will pass, or to prepare for an opportunity. And for the way the tarot has often been coded to carry the occult knowledge of other disciplines for those who care to add that layer to their reading, the palmistry chart behind the figure of the querent also resembles a hamsa, the Hand of Fatima, a talisman for warding off the evil eye. Their gloved hands feel like a different kind of privacy in this context.
Irving Penn (American, 1917–2009). The Tarot Reader (Bridget Tichenor and Jean Patchett), New York. Gelatin silver print, 19 3/8 x 18 1/2 in. (49 x 47 cm.). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Promised Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation (L.2018.62.125) © Condé Nast
The models, Bridget Bate Tichenor on the left, and Jean Patchett on the right, were, in 1949, already famous beauties, in demand as models and appearing in many of Penn’s photos, Patchett especially. Tichenor, or B. B. T. as she came to be known to friends, would become an editor at Vogue. The Tichenor in her name comes from her husband Jonathan Tichenor, who was, when they met, a photo assistant to another iconic photographer of the era, George Platt Lynes. She would eventually divorce him and become a Surrealist painter in Mexico.
Patchett, meanwhile, made famous a makeup look still familiar to us to this day, so widespread so it might be hard to believe it ever had a beginning: the “Doe Eye,” consisting of eyebrows arched as if raised in skeptical appraisal or wonder, rising and then coming back down to almost meet the eyeliner and lashes on the upper lids of the eye. In her iconic 1950 Vogue cover, for their Mid-Century issue, Erwin Blumenfeld photographed her face in an intense close-up, turned to the side, the gaze direct, her eyelids shimmering with blue and green eyeshadow, a beauty mark tipping down below her severe red lips. She could be any of the beauties that came after her, from Marilyn Monroe to Linda Evangelista. When I first did drag, before I ever saw this photo, I knew to draw my eyes in this way, to make a beauty mark like this too. I find myself wondering if any of this was in the cards Tichenor held that day.
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