Irving Penn

Irving Penn is widely celebrated as one of the 20th century’s most influential photographers. His images which capture a refined, elegant, minimalism which has become canonised in both the fashion and the art worlds.

Born 1917 in Plainfield, New Jersey to immigrant parents, Penn attended the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Arts from 1934–38 and studied under designer Alexey Brodovitch in his Design Laboratory and was exposed to magazines, exhibitions, architecture, and photography.

In 1943, Penn began working at Vogue under the directorship of Alexander Liberman, which was the start of an over 60-year relationship with Condé Nast.  He spent several years traveling Europe and South America on assignment cementing his distinct style and striking compositions of still lifes, portraits, and ethnographic studies. It was on these travels that he defined his studio practice, trimming away anything that wasn’t essential to his composition.

In 1950, Penn was sent to Paris to photograph haute couture collections and he created some of his most iconic fashion images, composed of purely the model in a studio lit by daylight with a discarded theatre curtain as the backdrop. He met his Lisa Fonssagrives during this period and became his lifelong muse, collaborator, and wife.

This simplicity permeated his other portraits, including his ‘corner series’ where he figured cultural giants of the era like Georgia O’Keefe, Man Ray, and the Duchess of Windsor, as well as his Small Trades series where he photographed tradesmen in Paris, London, and New York in his spare studio, equipped with the clothes and tools of their trade.

Beyond portraiture, Penn discovered the potential for everyday discards to become objects of beauty, depicting cigarettes, bleached animal skulls, arrangements of food, street waste, and other unexpected objects.

In the early 1960s, Penn started extensively researching and experimenting with 19th century printing methods that could offer him more control over the subtle variations and tonalities that he sought in a print. He formed a complex process for printing in platinum and palladium metals, enlarging negatives for contact printing onto artist’s paper adhered to an aluminium sheet to withstand multiple coatings and printings, showcasing an expansive and delicate tonal range.

Irving Penn’s legacy continues to grow, with his work celebrated by major institutions worldwide. Significant exhibitions include his first major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art (1984); Small Trades at the J. Paul Getty Museum (2009); Irving Penn: Beyond Beauty at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (2015–2016); and the centennial retrospective Irving Penn: Centennial, organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and presented at the Grand Palais and the de Young Museum (2017–2018). The primary repository for his archive is the Art Institute of Chicago. His work is held in numerous private and public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Art Institute of Chicago; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.