Irving Penn was one of the twentieth century’s great photographers, known for his arresting images and masterful printmaking across the genres of fashion, portraiture, nudes, still life, and advertising. Celebrated as one of Vogue magazine’s top photographers for more than sixty years, Penn also created an extensive body of personal work, pursuing projects that depicted unexpected subjects and expanded the technical boundaries of the physical print.
Throughout the 1940s and 50s, Penn traveled extensively for Vogue, making portraits of cultural figures that have often become the definitive images of his sitters. Around 1948, Penn began making portraits in a small corner space created by two studio flats pushed together. The subjects he photographed ranged from Truman Capote to Marcel Duchamp. As Penn noted, “For me the picture possibilities were interesting: limiting the subjects’ movement seemed to relieve me of part of the problem of holding on to them.” Fraenkel Gallery’s first solo show of Penn’s work, in 1992, featured selections from this series.
In 1949, Penn embarked on a series of figure studies that were distinct from his highly controlled magazine work. Often using models who typically worked with painters and sculptors, Penn captured women in close-up, emphasizing their solidity and curves. Experimenting with technique, Penn bleached and redeveloped prints until they took on an ethereal quality, describing the work as his attempt to “undo [the] realism of the photographic print.”
In 1950 Penn began a series of full-length portraits of tradespeople, working first in the Paris studio where he also photographed fashion, and then in London and New York. Drawing inspiration in part from Eugene Atget’s portraits of workers, Penn asked his subjects to come to the studio dressed as they would for their jobs, which ranged from longshoreman and rag and bone man to butcher and mailman. The photographs offer a look at vanished professions, and capture a sense of pride in work that resonated with Penn’s approach to photography. Selections from the series were published in Vogue, and Fraenkel Gallery showed the work in 1997, in the first exhibition solely devoted to the series.
Throughout his career, Penn moved between focusing on the printed page and creating prints that existed outside of his magazine and advertising work. In the early 1960s, he began investigating nineteenth-century printing methods that offered greater control over tonalities, developing a complex process for printing in platinum and palladium metals. Penn enlarged negatives for contact printing on hand-sensitized artist’s paper, which was adhered to an aluminum sheet to withstand multiple coatings and printings. The shift led to several major series conceived for platinum, including Cigarettes, in which Penn transformed what is commonly considered garbage into exquisite abstracted images. Fraenkel Gallery exhibited selections from this series in 1990.
Penn began photographing flowers in 1967 for a series that ran in Vogue’s Christmas issues, and continued the project through the 2000s. His photographs transform botanical subjects into elegant studies of form, texture, and color, isolating each bloom against a neutral background. The images capture both the vitality and—with flowers that have passed their prime—the impermanence of beauty. Penn often pictured his subjects “when they have already begun spotting and browning and twisting on their way back to the earth,” he noted.
Irving Penn has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions, including Irving Penn: Centennial, which originated at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2017 before traveling internationally, and was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue. Other exhibition highlights include Irving Penn Portraits, at the National Portrait Gallery, London; Irving Penn, 1917-2009 at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Small Trades, at The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; and Earthly Bodies: Irving Penn’s Nudes, 1949-50, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His monographs include more than two dozen publications. His work is held by institutions 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, among many others.
