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Irving Penn (June 16, 1917 – October 7, 2009)

Irving Penn, born a quarter century after Vogue was founded, spent 66 of his 92 years at the magazine. His first credit appeared in the August 1943 issue; his last in August 2009. In all he photographed 164 covers for Vogue.

The cultural and artistic ferment of the first two postwar decades in America, and the conviction of Alexander Liberman, the magazine's art director, that Vogue should contain features on emergent trends in the arts, allowed Penn to document the best of the newest.

“I can get obsessed by anything if I look at it long enough. That’s the curse of being a photographer.” – Irving Penn

Born in 1917 in Plainfield, New Jersey to immigrant parents, Irving Penn attended the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Arts from 1934–38 and studied with Alexey Brodovitch in his Design Laboratory.

In 1938, Penn bought a Rolleiflex with earnings from drawings published in Harper's Bazaar, using it to record his observations in what he called "camera-notes."

Camera notes from around 1938
The Surrealist inspiration in Penn's early photos is evident throughout the rest of his long career.

After some time in New York as Brodovitch's assistant at Harper's Bazaar and various art director jobs, Penn went to Mexico to paint in 1941, traveling through the American South and taking photographs along the way. He was ultimately disappointed by his paintings and destroyed them before returning to New York late the following year.

In 1943, the new art director at Vogue, Alexander Liberman, hired Penn as his associate to prepare layouts and suggest ideas for covers to the magazine's photographers. Liberman, another Russian émigré who had worked in Paris, looked at Penn's contact sheets from his recent travels and recognized "a mind, and an eye that knew what it wanted to see."

Penn's job involved giving ideas and instructions to photographers. He found some of them unco-operative. Liberman encouraged Penn to begin taking the photographs that he envisioned, launching a long and fruitful career as well as a collaboration that transformed modern photography.

Penn's first photographic cover 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 with the American Field Service instead and he found himself driving an ambulance in support of the British Eighth Army.

In 1948 Vogue commissioned Penn to do a fashion shoot in Lima, Peru, alongside Jean Patchett, on her first photoshoot. The resulting spread was entitled “Flying down to Lima” and was featured in the 15 February 1949 issue.

In Jean Patchett's account, Penn spent hour after hour fiddling with his camera and lights and not taking a single photo. Eventually bored and exhausted, she sat down and pushed her shoes off. "That's it!" he exclaimed. And that (below right) was the picture he took ... and which was used.

Flying Down To Lima

This fashion ‘story’ was to be the only one Penn would shoot entirely on location. After this he preferred to work with a simple studio backdrop.

In 1948, after photographing model Jean Patchett in Peru, Penn continued on to Cuzco where he took photographs of the local people in traditional dress. The resulting story, “Christmas at Cuzco,” became the first of a series of portraits, continued in portfolios published between 1967 and 1971. Penn traveled to Benin, then the Republic of Dahomey, Nepal, Cameroon, New Guinea, and Morocco, to photograph, in a self-designed portable studio, his subjects wearing their own clothes on their own ground.

Worlds in a Small Room

Each year Vogue published a Christmas Special featuring Penn's exotic pictures from his travels to remote corners of the globe. Later in his career Vogue commissioned him to do flower photographs for their Christmas specials. (More of the flowers, further on on this page.)

Worlds in a Small Room

"The photographic process for me is primarily simplification and elimination. It’s that simplification that I need in a picture that really relates more to old painting and old sculpture...What I yearn for as a photographer is someone who will connect the work of photographers to that of sculptors and painters of the past." – Irving Penn, 1975

“I’ve tried a few times to depart from what I know I can do, and I’ve failed. I’ve tried to work outside the studio, but it introduces too many variables that I can’t control. I’m really quite narrow, you know.” – Irving Penn

“What I really try to do is photograph people at rest, in a state of serenity.” – Irving Penn

Owing to his evident talents with both still-life arrangement and portraiture, Penn was tasked with Vogue’s group portraits. These bravado feats of choreography were often tough assignments. Given the competitiveness of many fashion models, photographing "The Twelve Most Photographed Models", (New York 1947 below) could have been harrowing. At the time, Penn was in a relationship with Dorian Leigh (on the floor, nearest the camera). In the centre (in black and in profile) is Lisa Fonssagrives with whom Penn became enamoured. They were married in London three years later.

The Twelve Most Photographed Models, New York 1947

The group above comprises, (left to right): Meg Mundy, Marilyn Ambrose, Helen Bennett, Dana Jenney, Betty McLauchlen (on ladder), Lisa Fonssagrives, Lily Carlson, Dorian Leigh (on floor), Andrea Johnson (seated), Elisabeth Gibbons, Muriel Maxwell (in black) and Kay Hernan.

In 1950, shortly after his wedding, Penn was sent to Paris to photograph the haute couture collections for Vogue. He was accompanied by his wife, Lisa Fonssagrives. Penn worked in a daylight studio with an old theater curtain as a backdrop, and Lisa was a real help as a model, but also as someone who understood Dior's 'New Look', first launched in 1947. The shoot created a template for Penn's fashion work.

Paris 1950

Penn’s contrary streak found expression early in his career. Starting in 1948, after shooting designer dresses for Vogue by day, Penn made 70 photographs of fleshy, curvy nudes as a personal project. The project came to an end in 1950 when he married razor-thin fashion model Lisa Fonssagrives, who appeared in many of his magazine photographs through the ‘50s. The voluptuous nudes were a bachelor photographer’s last fling, Penn later said.

Earthly Bodies

Penn first exhibited this series of Rubenesque nudes in 1980 as “Earthly Bodies” at the Marlborough Gallery in New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City featured them again in 2002.

At Vogue Penn was always adressed as "Mr. Penn", an indication of his calm and commanding presence. He really disliked his first name. Always allowed a great deal of creative license, he clearly also earned people's respect and there is little sense that he ever suffered creative conflicts or tensions.

Phyllis Posnick, who worked with a host of great photographers at Vogue creating photo editorial essays, had a special rapport with Penn and remarked: "He pushed and he pushed and he pushed until he got the best out of every subject. And only he knew what the best was. I did not know. Only he knew. ... To this day, I still ask 'What would Penn do?'"

Marisa Berenson was the niece of designer Elsa Schiaparelli, who sent her to be photographed by Penn as a kind of apprenticeship on the way to becoming a very successful model: "Mr. Penn taught me patience. He taught me rigor. He taught me discipline." Schiaparelli was beyond furious when she - later - learned that her niece had posed nude for Penn.

Jean Patchett

Between 1943 and 2004 Penn produced photographs for 165 Vogue magazine covers, more than any other artist to date. Jean Patchett was the subject of the photographer’s April 1, 1950, cover (above), his first in black-and-white, and the first non-color Vogue cover published since May 1932.

For his first extensive portrait campaign, he set up unusual environments in the studio for his sitters to insert themselves into and react against: a constricted corner space made of two walls placed at an angle, and a tattered carpet draped over a solid base they could sit on. These point to Penn's interest in disruption, present in his early work for the magazine as he attempted to give his images a grittiness that would animate the page.

Noël Coward, Salvador Dali, Truman Capote (x2)

This practice allowed Penn to refine his ability to produce the environment without anything more than a backdrop and a stool. Always one to eschew ornate backgrounds that could distract from the subject, in his portraits Penn sought to distill the essence of his subject. When discussing his portraiture, he framed it as an attempt to find a person at a moment of calm, when they allowed the facade to fall away.

In 1950–51, inspired by old prints of street criers and a photoessay (L'Elegance du Métier) by André Kertész in Vu, 1933, Penn began a series of photographs depicting representatives of the "Small Trades" in Paris, London, and New York.

Photoessay by André Kertész in Vu, no. 204, 5 April 1933, pp. 504-505

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.

Small Trades

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."

"In 1967 there was word coming out of San Francisco of something stirring - new ways of living that were exotic even for California. People spoke of a new kind of young people called hippies, and of an area where they had begun to congregate called Haight-Ashbury. They seemed to have found a satisfying new life for themselves in leaving the society they were born to and in making their own ... It grew on me that I would like to look into the faces of these new San Francisco people through a camera in a daylight studio, against a simple background, away from their own daily circumstances. I suggested to the editors of Look magazine that they might care to have such a report. They said yes - hurry." - Irving Penn, Worlds in a Small Room, (1974)

Hell's Angels, Hippie Family (Ferguson), New York Ballet Theatre

A major part of Penn's work for Vogue consisted of portraits of celebrities, artists, writers, and other personalities relevant to the reporting valued by the magazine.

Marlene Dietrich, Robert de Niro, Miles Davis, Truman Capote, Richard Avedon, Irving Penn (in a cracked mirror)
Penn (in silhouette), Nadja Auermann, Cocteau, Richard Avedon

A number of Penn's editorials for Vogue were categorized as "beauty" pictures, conceived to illustrate concepts loosely related to cosmetics evoked in the magazine's pages. They often allowed Penn to employ his sense of wit and concision to create an image that could stand out and "stop traffic."

One of Phyllis Posnick's responsibilities was Vogue's magazine’s health and beauty section, where a theme was typically illustrated by a single image shot by Penn. These were striking grab-you-by-the-throat images that seemed to leap from the page, leading the Telegraph to dub her “Vogue’s most provocative editor”.

"Bee Stung Lips" (Vogue, 1955)

In 1955, when women started having collagen injected to make their lips fuller, Penn remembered that the expression "Bee Stung Lips" had been a popular expression to characterise full, pouty lips. A bee keeper was flown from New Mexico. Bees become docile when cold and the bee keeper kept the bees in a fridge. A brave model, Estella Warren, allowed one bee after another to be placed on her lips.

"Cult Creams" (1996)

"Cult Creams" was a shoot about some new cream moisturizers, which was “incredibly dull to photograph,” as Posnick has said in a Vogue interview. To make it less dull, she says Penn had the idea of dropping the cream on the model’s head, something he’d seen on an old 50s TV show. Like a custard pie to the face. (Phyllis Posnick retells these stories in her book Stoppers: Photographs from My Life at Vogue, 2016, which is dedicated to Penn.)

In the last years of Penn and Posnick’s collaborations, their working relationship was so smooth and streamlined that Posnick was apparently the only Vogue editor Penn would work with.

Underpinning all of Penn's work as a photographer is his special talent in the still-life genre, to which he applied his signature resolve to prune away anything that did not contribute to the picture. From his earliest work at Vogue to his latest series of personal work, this resulted in powerful images that invite contemplation of Penn’s acute awareness of objects and their placement.

Still Life

Penn “had been trained as a painter, and every time I described the concept for an article or showed him clothes, he would sit across the table from me and draw. ... He sketched almost everything he photographed and the photographs looked exactly like his sketches.” [Phyllis Posnick]

Food pictures to accompany various Vogue articles on food, health or diet

Penn's approach to the still-life evolved over decades; from the 1930s onwards, he arranged everyday objects to create assemblages, which transcended their origins and original purpose to become conceptual works of art. Penn frequently included elements of memento mori and selected subject matter that could, at first glance, seem unworthy of close examination, which give his images a "bite" that lingers.

In the case of Cigarettes however, Penn literally found his subjects on the street. By bringing them into his studio and carefully creating these minimalist compositions, he transformed one of the most widely consumed and discarded products of consumer society from that of pure detritus into a symbolic representation of contemporary culture. This transformative act resulted in one of the most elegant yet direct expressions of post-modern artistic practice.

The cigarettes

By printing the Cigarettes in the platinum palladium process, Penn also elevated each image to the status of a rare object; many of his most important pictures were printed in platinum, which is the most difficult and demanding of all photographic techniques. The soft, broad tonal ranges and gentle contrasts accentuate the nature of the original objects, further emphasizing their material characteristics.

New York’s Museum of Modern Art found the cigarette butts exhibit-worthy in 1975. Many reviewers, who questioned whether anything by a fashion photographer belonged in an art museum, called the work pretentious. A similar debate stewed during a 1977 exhibit at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art of Penn’s photos of urban debris.

Penn started to photograph flowers in 1967 after being commissioned by Vogue USA to illustrate their Christmas edition with images of tulips. This became the first of seven issues which Penn would illustrate with different genera of flowers. The photographs were collectively published as a book, ‘Flowers’, published in 1980. Penn later revisited the idea of flowers in the 1990’s and early 2000’s, using flowers as a metaphor for his older age and the beauty which can be found in the expiring bloom.

Vogue commissioned Penn to take flowers for their Christmas Special

After his retrospective exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, Penn returned to painting and drawing as a full-fledged creative endeavor. He even introduced elements from photography and printing to his painting practice, photographing a drawing to print in platinum, which he then used as a matrix for a painting.

Some of Penn's late art works

Penn was well aware of his shortcomings. “I’m a surprisingly limited photographer,” he insisted, “and I’ve learned not to go beyond my capacity. I’ve tried a few times to depart from what I know I can do, and I’ve failed. I’ve tried to work outside the studio, but it introduces too many variables that I can’t control. I’m really quite narrow, you know.”

Penn noted that he always strove to accommodate "the point of view of the magazine I work for" rather than attempt to make "a much more profound statement of fashion--fashion in living, fashion in feeling and in thinking, than I would ever dream of attempting or even be interested in attempting ... The pictures that I take are individual images that sit inside their rectangle... I don't attempt to make them profound... I don't think the girl's personality should ever intrude... Dick's (Avedon's) view is a much broader one; in that he's telling you something about our time. Mine is a very narrow one -- you can see a great deal more of the buttons and the seams. ... [but] I am pretty tired of girls, and attitude, and dresses." (1964, quoted in Focus: The Secret, Sexy Sometimes Sordid World of Fashion Photographers, Michael Gross, 2016)

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Since Dec 2016 our U3A history of photography seminar has covered more than 50 individual photographers. Contact me if you wish to check out our treatment of anyone in particular...

Among those we have discussed are... [underlined names indicate links to pages I have created for our discussions]...

Ansel Adams, André Kertész, Man Ray, Dorothea Lange, Robert Capa, Fay Godwin, David Goldblatt, Martin Parr, Mark Riboud, Germaine Krull, Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis, Joel Meyerowitz, Annie Leibovitz, Eugene Atget, Garry Winogrand, Man Ray, Lee Miller, 'The Idea of North and Northern' Photographers, Sebastiao Salgado, Richard Avedon and other fashion photographers, Irving Penn, Robert Frank, Charles Howdill, Alexander Rodchenko, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Elliott Erwitt, Vivian Maier, Diane Arbus, Walker Evans, John Davies, John Blakemore, Ralph Gibson, Daido Moriyama, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brassai, Magnum: David Seymour (Chim), George Rodger, Stephen Shore, Dora Maar, Bill Brandt, Gordon Parks, Tina Modotti, Imogen Cunningham (revisited), Saul Leiter & Fred Herzog, Simon Roberts, Don McCullin, David Bailey, Karl Blossfeldt, Robert Maplethorpe, W. Eugene Smith, August Sander, Carolyn Mendelsohn, Ansel Adams (revisited), W. Eugene Smith, Josef Koudelka, Josef Sudek, Sirkka-Lissa Konttinen, Chris Killip, Jeff Wall, Greg Crewdson, Phillip-Lorca-diCorcia, Helmut Newton, Hans van der Meer, Peter Dench, Margaret Bourke-White, Inge Morath, Lisette Model, Helen Levitt, Robert Adams, Henri Lartigue, Alfred Stieglitz, Pictorialism, Edward Steichen, Nadar, Daguerre, Fox Talbot, the invention of photography and the 19thC, Hill and Adamson, Frank Meadow Sutcliffe, The f/64 group and its philosophy, Alex Webb, Harry Gruyert, Berenice Abbott, Sergio Larrain, Lars Tunbjork, Hans Eijkelboom, Eamonn Doyle, Trent Park, Mark Power, Paul Reas, Paul Graham, Paul Strand, Robert Adams and 'A (Brief) History of Fashion Photography'

In addition I have written pages on

  • Vermeer's Women
  • Women in the Paintings of the Dutch Golden Age
  • Women in the Impressionist's circle
Created By
Lloyd Spencer
Appreciate

Credits:

All photos by Irving Penn (downloaded from the internet under fair use terms)