Irving Penn (June 16, 1917 – October 7, 2009) was an American photographer known for his fashion photography, portraits, and still lifes. Penn’s career included work at Vogue magazine, and independent advertising work for clients including Issey Miyake and Clinique. His work has been exhibited internationally and continues to inform the art of photography.
Table of Contents
- 1 Career
- 2 Photography
- 2.1 Irving Penn: Centennial
- 2.2 Irving Penn: Beyond Beauty
- 2.3 Passage: A Work Record
- 2.4 Flowers
- 2.5 Irving Penn: Small Trades
- 2.6 Irving Penn Portraits
- 2.7 Irving Penn: A Career in Photography (BULFINCH)
- 2.8 Irving Penn: Master Images (The Collection of the National Museum of American Art and the National Portrait Gallery)
- 2.9 Irving Penn: Platinum Prints
- 2.10 Irving Penn Regards the Work of Issey Miyake: Photographs 1975-1998
Career
Penn worked for three years as a freelance designer taking his first amateur photographs previously taking Brodovitch’s viewpoint as the art director at Saks Fifth Avenue in 1940. Penn remained at Saks Fifth Avenue for a year before neglect to spend a year painting and taking photographs in Mexico and across the US. When Penn returned to New York, Alexander Liberman offered him a approach as an connect in Vogue magazine’s Art Department. Penn worked upon layout for the magazine back Liberman asked him to attempt photography.
Penn’s first photographic lid for Vogue magazine appeared in October 1943. The art department of the Office of War Information in London offered him a job as an “artist-photographer” but he volunteered later the American Field Service instead. After arriving in Naples similar to a boatload of American troops in November 1944. Penn drove an ambulance in withhold of the British Eighth Army as it alternately waited out weather and slogged its pretension north through a horrible winter in the Italian Apennines. In July 1945, he was transferred from Italy to India. He photographed the soldiers, medical operations, and camp life for the AFS, and various subjects even though bivouacked in India. He sailed assist to New York in November 1945.
Penn continued to perform at Vogue throughout his career, photographing covers, portraits, still-lifes, fashion, and photographic essays. In the 1950s, Penn founded his own studio in New York and began making advertising photographs. Over the years, Penn’s list of clients grew to adjoin General Foods, De Beers, Issey Miyake, and Clinique.
Penn met Swedish fashion model Lisa Fonssagrives at a photo shoot in 1947. In 1950, the two married at Chelsea Register Office, and two years well ahead Lisa gave birth to their son, Tom Penn, who would become a metal designer. Lisa Fonssagrives died in 1992. Penn died aged 92 upon October 7, 2009 at his home in Manhattan.
Photography
Best known for his fashion photography, Penn’s repertoire along with included portraits of creative greats; ethnographic photographs from as regards the world; Modernist still-life works of food, bones, bottles, metal, and found objects; and photographic travel essays.
Penn was accompanied by the old-fashioned photographers to pose subjects adjacent to a simple grey or white backdrop and he effectively used its simplicity. Expanding his austere studio surroundings, Penn build up a set of upright angled backdrops, to form a stark, acute corner. Subjects photographed when this technique included John Hersey, Martha Graham, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Georgia O’Keeffe, W. H. Auden, and Igor Stravinsky.
Penn’s nevertheless life compositions are sparse and severely organized, assemblages of food or objects that articulate the abstract interplay of stock and volume. Penn’s photographs are composed afterward a great attention to detail, which continues into his craft of developing and making prints of his photographs. Penn experimented next many printing techniques, including prints made upon aluminum sheets coated like a platinum emulsion rendering the image later a exhilaration that untoned silver prints lacked. His black and white prints are notable for their deep contrast, giving them a clean, crisp look.
While steeped in the Modernist tradition, Penn moreover ventured over creative boundaries. The exhibition Earthly Bodies consisted of series of posed nudes whose beast shapes range from skinny to plump; while the photographs were taken in 1949 and 1950, they were not exhibited until 1980.
Last update 2021-08-06