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Irving Penn revolutionized the world of fashion photography with his artful still-lifes and elegant portraits. We showcase some of the memorable works that led him to be regarded as one of the most important photographers of the mid-20th century.
“Photographing a cake can be art,” once said the legendary photographer Irving Penn, who died on October 7 at the age of 92. It's a statement that reveals a large part of his legacy to the world of photography: that of immaculately arranged still-lifes and images that blur the boundaries between commercial photography and fine art. As well as this, Penn will also be remembered for his restrained style of portraiture, which revolutionized the world of fashion photography and, alongside the more fluid work of Richard Avedon, led him to be regarded as one of the two most important photographers of the mid-20th century.
Born June 16, 1917 in New Jersey, Penn studied art and design at Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia, where he was taught by Alexey Brodovitch, the influential art director of Harper’s Bazaar. Brodovitch introduced him to Alexander Liberman, another important art director who would later employ Penn as his assistant at Vogue.
“I was struck by his directness and a curious unworldliness, a clarity of purpose, and a freedom of decision,” wrote Liberman of his first meeting with Penn in the introduction to Penn’s book “Passage” (1991). “What I call Penn’s American instincts made him go for the essentials.”
It was Liberman who asked Penn to shoot his first Vogue cover: a still-life of a leather bag, a scarf, a pair of gloves, a large topaz and a group of lemons and oranges. Penn was just 26 when it was published on October 1, 1943. It was the first of over 150 covers he would shoot for Vogue, a title he will forever be associated with.
"In my career, I have met no one else who worked with the level of imaginative intensity and economy of Irving Penn," US Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour told WWD upon hearing the news of his death. "His photographs were as exquisite and electrifying in the last year of his life as they were in 1943, when he started contributing to Vogue. To have been a colleague and friend of one of the greatest artists of the 20th century is a privilege greater than I could have ever imagined."
At Vogue, Penn’s work was characterized by carefully constructed shapes that were isolated from their surroundings and which he would create either with objects or with the rigid pose of a model. He was a perfectionist but he did not wish to photograph a perfect world; his images often featured surprises such as a beetle in a model’s ear or a fly on a basket of fruit.
Penn’s elegant editorial work led to commercial work that reinvented the way fashion and beauty advertising was shot. He famously photographed Clinique beauty products as still-lifes (beauty photography had until then consisted of photographs of models with flawless and heavily made-up skin). Issey Miyake was another long-time advertising client who affectionately referred to Penn as “Penn-san”.
During his own time, Penn photographed meticulous arrangements of bones and animal skulls, and travelled to exotic destinations to shoot local people with a portable studio. Some of this work was taken with the specific intention of being exhibited in galleries and museums such as the MoMA in New York. His photographs of trades people carrying the tools of their trade in Paris, London and New York in the early 1950s are currently being shown at the exhibition “Irving Penn: Small Trades” at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.
Perhaps it was in the process of Penn’s photography where his greatest talent lay. Not only was he an accomplished technician in the dark room (Penn mastered the laborious and difficult platinum palladium process of printing), but also he had a passion for beautiful images. One of Penn’s favorite portrait subjects was his wife, the model Lisa Fonssagrives, who he was married to for 42 years until her death in 1992. Whether it was Fonssagrives or a still-life of bones, Penn was intent on capturing beauty, something that today’s fashion photographers are not always interested in. “We don’t call them shoots here,” Penn told American Vogue in 2004. “We don’t shoot people. It’s really a love affair.”
More info:
Irving Penn: Small Trades, runs through to January 10, 2010, at the Getty Center, Los Angeles.