Irving Penn for years has been considered a prestigious and renowned name. Known not only for fashion photography, he is internationally recognized as a leader in the photography movement of fine arts. Ingenuity and innovation have been his aids over time as he is extolled for his creative ideas, brilliant eye, intuitive mind, and superior technique. Some may say he was destined for such a form of expression as photography, but anyone beyond the casual observer will assess that it was perseverance and a trip to Mexico that brought Irving Penn to his present status.
Born in Plainfield, New Jersey, on June 16, 1917, Irving Penn first sensed creative inspiration in his schooling as a young adult. Enrolling at age 18 into a rigid, four-year course study of art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Penn’s main focus was advertising design. Under the careful direction of the well-known Alexey Brodovitch, he pursued a career as an advertising director. Still unaware of his future as a photographer, Penn took his first apprentice job as an office boy sketching pairs of shoes for the Harper’s Bazaar magazine in New York. Upon his graduation in 1938, Irving Penn was approached with an offer as art director of the Junior League magazine and later of the Saks Fifth Avenue department store. Four years later, at age 25, Penn retreated to Mexico after quitting his job. It was then that fate, as some would consider it, took over.
Convinced that he was never to exceed the standards of a middling painter, Penn returned to the Big Apple, somewhat relinquishing his hopes of becoming an executive art director. It was then that he was employed by Alexander Liberman of Vogue magazine as an office assistant, but, more importantly, to supply ideas for the pictorial likenesses of the subjects for magazine covers. Borrowing a camera, he earnestly set to work photographing a still life that portrayed the delicate balance between fashion and reality. Utilizing the arrangement of a beige scarf, brown leather bag, gloves, oranges, lemons, and a topaz, he had little thought of the popular response it would bring to his status in the public eye. A huge success in composition, refinement, and artistry, in both personal aspects and business markets, his cover idea was published October 1, 1943. Irving Penn’s career as a photographer was launched. His progress was just beginning.
Plunged into the photographic world, Irving Penn began to adapt to his own style. Exhibiting balance and versatility in all of his photographs, he attained the illustrious role of composing editorial illustrations for Vogue magazine. Often traveling to seek out desired viewpoints and semblances of his current mindset, and utilizing intriguing and varying angles, Penn created a multitude of photographic collages. Dramatizing differing tones and lights, he strove to capture more wholly the reactions and inner emotions of the photographic subject than ever before, while keeping them in a somewhat detached psychological state for the camera. With a keen eye and a shrewd mind, Penn produced highly complex and thought-provoking works. He has been quoted as saying, “Photographing a cake can be a work of art.” A more modern delegate in the Pictorialist Movement, he strove to reinvent photography as a work of art that everyone would concede to, preparing nearly all his materials by hand. Printing many of his works on such handcrafted platinum paper, Penn redefined previous notions of photography and became competition for even the most notable of photographers.
Opening his own studio in 1953 at the age of 36, Penn embraced techniques that had long been considered antiquated. Relatively instantly, Irving Penn became one of the most influential power-heads photography had yet seen. Highly meticulous in his work, Penn always preferred the strict situation of his studio and its controlled properties.
Sometimes even constructing architectural facades for the desired effect, he strove to modernize the early 19th century perception of feminine flair and trim. Composing two- or three-dimensional forms, Penn continued his still-life work for Vogue, always favoring his work printed in the monochromatic tones of gray or on white seamless paper as a backdrop. It was early on that, like many of the great artists, Penn used contrivances and stratagems in his work. His “corner period” was particularly effective in portraying the unhampered emotions of the people whom Penn photographed. Placing two backgrounds together to create a mock corner, Penn had each of his subjects enter and photographed the result. While some felt secure and confident within the corner’s confines, others felt quite the opposite, unsure and diffident. This degree of varying silent impressions continuously provided Penn’s camera with the fuel of inspiration for time to come.
A second interval to which Irving Penn immersed himself was one involving a rug he purchased on New York’s Third Avenue. In his own words, he explains, “The rug merged with the background in tone value, and its form could be changed by the number and placement of boxes used under it. It was a good foil for people’s faces.” By creating a lush and inviting background, the subjects’ faces could display a feeling of either warmth or contentment that is often so hard to capture effectively. Alfred Hitchcock is one of many celebrity faces of this second period. Following a fashion assignment, another series of portraits was born. While waiting for his departure between planes, he beseeched a native in the Andes to rent him the studio. Making it his own for the time, Penn composed over 200 black and white portraits, utilizing the stone floor, painted background, petite rug, and cushioned piano posing stool. In a later series, the “Small Trades” project, as he later referred to it, Penn photographed grand amounts of commonplace workers in the attire appropriate for their labor and also with the tools they required for their vocations. With Penn’s distinguishing side lighting, each stood alone against a plain background, taking pride in displaying the tools of their trades. Behind the camera, it was similarly Penn displaying the joy he himself took in his work.
More recently, Penn has taken a controversial stance in his photography. By scouring the streets of New York he snaps the shutter at the gum and cigarette butts on the ground, framing street trash. One of his newest releases, Underfoot, could be interpreted as portraying the crudeness that lurks beneath the so-called sophisticated and high-brow urban person, metaphorically speaking, a secret of our true existence which we wish to keep hidden, underfoot.
Irving Penn lives today in the suburbs of New York. He continues to vary his methods of photography and the instruments thereof. Whether it be through a Leica, Nikon, Rolleiflex, or Hasselblad, he continually renews his purpose through the lenses of his cameras. Now in the 21st century, technology is at his disposal, enhancing what was already great to the next level of prominence.
Furthermore, the photographer Irving Penn is a man of many complex angles. Trying to express the beauty in human being, he is far more than noteworthy. Characteristic of his photographic nature are the diligence and time he puts into the creation and development of each portrait, the light that he has learned to utilize marvelously, the unique angles from which he views his world, and most importantly, his desire to capture people as they are, without the boundaries of society. His tool is the camera, and it serves him well. It serves the world well.
