Before he was the famous author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958) and In Cold Blood (1966), Truman Capote (1924–1984) was a young writer from
New Orleans whose star was beginning to rise. Taken just months after the
publication of his first novel in 1948, this portrait is the earliest of three that
Irving Penn made of the writer during his life. It comes from a larger series
of portraits Penn made for Vogue
around 1948 in which he photographed his sitters in the corner formed by two
studio flats pushed together. With that confined setting, the studio transformed
from a neutral white backdrop to a claustrophobic space entrapping its subjects,
among whom were Louis Armstrong, Salvador Dalí, and Marlene Dietrich. With the
walls closing in on him and the floor littered with electrical wires, Capote adopts
a sense of compression in his own body, kneeling on a chair, huddling in an
oversized coat, and cocking his head to one side.