Irving Penn: Centennial

Although his images defined fashion for decades, Irving Penn began his artistic life dreaming of being a painter. He graduated from the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art in 1938 and traveled to Mexico by way of the American South and taking photographs along the way. A year in Mexico exploring painting led to deep disappointment, and the destruction of all but a small group of drawings. He frequently plotted out how he wanted the objects in his photos placed, but despite that the desire for control he didn’t return to painting until the late 1980s, which he continued until his death in 2009. We just learned about him and enjoyed his work tremendously, so we thought that we’d share.

Returning to New York, he hired on at Vogue magazine as an associate; his job was to prepare layouts and suggest ideas for covers to the magazine’s photographer. The magazine’s Art Director, Alexander Liberman, looked at Penn’s contact sheets from his recent travels and recognized “a mind, and an eye that knew what it wanted to see.*” Liberman encouraged Penn to do more with his photographs, beginning a collaboration that transformed modern photography. While at Vogue, Penn traveled the world utilizing an old theater curtain as a backdrop, or a tent studio that could be dismantled and taken from location to location. Penn felt “in this limbo [of the tent] there was for us both the possibility of contact that was a revelation to me and often, I could tell, a moving experience for the subjects themselves, who without words—by only their stance and their concentration—were able to say much that spanned the gulf between our different worlds.”

Offset print production declined in the 1960s, increasingly frustrating Penn with how his images looked on the page. In response, he became an alchemist. Utilizing extensive research and experimentation, Penn sought out and implemented nineteenth-century printing methods in search of greater control over the subtle variations and tonalities he sought in a print. In the end, he perfected a complex process for printing in platinum and palladium metals, enlarging negatives for contact printing on hand-sensitized artist’s paper, which was adhered to an aluminum sheet so that it could withstand multiple coatings and printings.

Penn’s work trims away anything nonessential to his compositions and focuses on his subjects. Nothing feels frivolous yet the images aren’t dour. His work primarily filled the pages of Vogue, particularly the haute couture collections of Paris, but he also produced a series of nudes, cigarettes (yes, really), and street materials. These series were rarely enjoyed, many found them repulsive, but Penn saw in the subject matter “a treasure of the city’s refuse, intriguing distorted forms of color, stain, and typography.”

In 1950–51, inspired by old prints of street criers, Penn began a series of photographs depicting representatives of the Small Trades in Paris, London, and New York. The project began in Paris, where he was assisted in the selection of subjects by French Vogue editor Edmonde Charles-Roux and photographer Robert Doisneau. Penn’s reflections on the tradespeople:

In general, the Parisians doubted that we were doing exactly what we said we were doing. They felt there was something fishy going on, but they came to the studio more or less as directed— for the fee involved. But the Londoners were quite different from the French. It seemed to them the most logical thing in the world to be recorded in their work clothes. They arrived at the studio, always on time, and presented themselves to the camera with a seriousness and pride that was quite endearing. Of the three, the Americans as a group were the least predictable. In spite of our cautions, a few arrived for their sittings having shed their work clothes, shaved, even wearing dark Sunday suits, sure this was their first step on the way to Hollywood.

One of the major projects of Penn’s career, which he pursued intermittently between 1948 and 1971, was a group of photographs made during his travels which he called Worlds in a Small Room. Following an experience in Cuzco working in a daylight studio, Penn sought out other opportunities to improvise or bring a studio with him to make portraits in a neutral environment. These encounters attempted to bridge the gaps of language, culture, and geography, to connect on a human level.

* Quotes and images from The Irving Penn Foundation (website).