Irving Penn
(1917 - 2009)
Irving Penn was born in Plainfield, New Jersey on June 16, 1917. From 1937 to 1938, Penn studied under Alexey Brodovitch at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art. In his last two years at school, 1937 to 1938, Penn worked on some design projects, as a graphic artist for Brodovitch, who was then art director of Harper's Bazaar.
It was his drawings and paintings that first caught the attention of Harper's Bazaar. At the time, Alexey Brodovitch was art consultant to the Saks Fifth Avenue advertising department, and took Penn as his assistant. From 1938 to 1940, Penn worked as a freelance designer in New York. In 1941 Penn met Alexander Liberman art director of Vogue, and the two established a friendship.
By 1942, having spent a year painting in Mexico, Penn recognized that his future lay elsewhere. In 1943 Liberman hired him as a creative assistant in the art department of Vogue. Liberman recognized Penn's photographic talent, and urged him to pursue his photography. Penn's first cover for Vogue was a still-life , which appeared on October 1, 1943. Over the next sixty years Penn photographed nearly one hundred seventy more. Shortly after his 1943 debut, he embarked on the photography of clothes. During world War II, Penn volunteered for the American field Service. He drove ambulances and took pictures of the troops in Italy and India.
Between 1944 and 1950 Penn completed more than three hundred portrait sittings for Vogue, personalities such as Spanish artist Salvador Dalí, Martha Graham, Marcel Duchamp, Georgia O'Keeffe, W.H. Auden, Igor Stravinsky, and Marlene Dietrich and Senator Hubert Humphrey, to name a few. Penn used his "corner portraits," in which his models were made to face the lens in carefully arranged poses against the simplest of studio backdrops. Most of these photographs were absolutely austere and in stark black and white. In 1948, Penn went to Peru for an an assignment for Vogue, when the project was concluded, he stayed behind in the city of Cuzco and took photographs of the indigenous people of that area, wearing their exotic clothing, against a painted cloth backdrop, thereby initiating a regular series of portraits documenting different cultures. This pursuit led him in later years, to photograph in countries as Dahomey, Nepal, Cameroon, New Guinea, and Morocco, where chronicled each countries ethnic types of dresses, their beauty, and exoticism.
From 1949 to 1950, Penn photographed the female nude (using voluptuous models), and created prints using a complex bleaching technique. Penn overprinted, bleached and redeveloped these prints to stress high contrast and thus accentuate the female's sculptural volumes. These photographs were a private series and were not publicly seen until a few were exhibited in 1980. Vogue commissions and other commercial work, mostly advertising, occupied Penn for the remainder of the 1950s. Penn's Vogue fashion photography reached its peak with his coverage of the Paris collections of 1950. Penn's work was known for his cool, refined, and glamorously stylized photographs. Penn used plain background and natural light and was adept at capturing the essence of his sitter's personality. Penn's photography remains unsurpassed as documents of haute-couture at its greatest.. Many times his photographs were so ahead of their time that they came to be appreciated as important works years after their creation. One of Penn's favorite models, and with whom he collaborated with was Swedish-born Lissa Fonssagrives, a world-famous dancer, fashion designer, photographer, and sculptor. He photographed Fonssagrives modeling the couture of the late nineteen-forties and early fifties, and in 1950, Fonssagrives became his wife; their marriage lasted forty-two years, until her death at the age of eighty, in 1992. Penn produced the magazine's first black-and-white cover in decades also in 1950; a memorable issue devoted to fashion, full of stylish and striking pictures, with Jean Patchett as model.
In1960, Penn published his first book, Moments Preserved, which contained the best of his fashion photography of the previous decade, Worlds in a Small Room, in 1974; Passage, in 1991; and A Notebook at Random, in 2004. Penn became disappointed with fashion photography in the 1960s and from then on his photographs in Vogue's fashion pages became scarce. During this time, Penn taught himself to print his own photography using a turn-of-the-century process that relies on platinum instead of more conventional silver. It produces beautiful, velvety tones in the image and is among the most permanent of photographic processes, but requires time-consuming preparation and precise control in the darkroom. Over the next 30 years Penn printed all his new work and reprinted much of his earlier work using this process. Penn perfe4cted a method that greatly increased depth and luminosity and brought the process back into popularity. From the mid-1970s Penn focused on work for exhibitions and books,however his beauty and still life compositions, and occasionally fashion pictures, continue to be published by Vogue. With more than sixty years contributing to the magazine, Penn is the longest-serving photographer and the most influential fashion photographers of the twentieth century. Irving Penn's name is beyond any doubt synonymous with fashion photography. Irving Penn died at age ninety-two October 7, 2009 at his home in Manhattan.
