Irving Penn - Photography

Photography

While perhaps best known for his fashion photography, Irving Penn's repertoire also includes portraits of creative greats; ethnographic photographs from around the world; Modernist still lifes of food, bones, bottles, metal, found objects, etc.; and stunning scenes from photographic travel essays. That said, his fashion photography is paramount to his career, and his creative eye helped to shape the post-World War II feminine chic and glamour photography of the mid-twentieth century.

Penn was among the first photographers to pose subjects against a simple grey or white backdrop and used this simplicity more effectively than other photographers. Expanding his austere studio surroundings, Penn constructed a set of upright angled backdrops, to form a stark, acute corner. Subjects photographed with this technique included Martha Graham, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Georgia O'Keeffe, W. H. Auden, Igor Stravinsky.

Penn's still life compositions are skillfully arranged assemblages of food or objects—at once spare and highly-organized, the objects articulate the abstract interplay of line and volume. All of Penn's photographs are composed with a great attention to detail, which continues into his craft of developing and making prints of his photographs. Penn experimented with many printing techniques, including prints made on aluminum sheets coated with a platinum emulsion rendering the image with a warmth and maturity that untoned silver prints lacked. His black and white prints are notable for their deep contrast, giving them a clean, crisp feel.

While steeped in the Modernist tradition, Penn also ventured beyond creative boundaries. The exhibition of Earthly Bodies consisted of series of posed nudes whose physical shapes range from thin to plump; while the photographs were taken in 1949-1950, they were not put on exhibit until 1980, perhaps in part because of questions about the public reception of the graphic representations of the female nude.