17.12.09
Irving Penn Profile
Rarely photographed and rarely interviewed, the American master of editorial photography, portraits, still lifes and nudes died recently aged 92. Peter Silverton profiles his incredible career.
Irving Penn was born in 1917, in Plainfield, New Jersey – a small commuter town across the Hudson from Manhattan that was also home to Jeff Barry (songwriter, Da Doo Ron Ron), George Clinton (funkateer, One Nation Under A Groove) and Penn’s younger brother Arthur (film director, Bonnie and Clyde). All those men have, in their own way, made their mark on our world. Penn, though, shaped our world – and our view of it. And he did it not just more than any other living photographer, but more than all but a few other visual artists. His pictures reveal to us what has always been there in front of our eyes – only unseen, unnoticed, uncomprehended. In 1991, The New York Times described him as “one of the most complex and intriguing artists of the latter half of this century”.
But Penn came to photography after trying – and rejecting – both art directing and painting. He went to the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art, where he studied under Alexey Brodovitch, a Bauhaus-minded, white Russian émigré who also taught Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand. His very first professional picture was Vogue’s very first colour cover. He’d been hired in 1943, as assistant to Alexander Liberman, the magazine’s then new art director. His job was to suggest covers for the magazine. His ideas were not welcome, so Liberman got Penn to shoot them.
Over the almost seven decades since, he made bravura, technically dextrous and psychologically complex pictures in at least five different disciplines: fashion, still life, portraiture, ethnography and nudes. Oh, and he shot campaigns for Issey Miyake, Clinique and Plymouth cars. “Penn shows me what I do,” Miyake had said. Fashion, first. When we think of post-war, pre-Beatles Manhattan, it’s most likely through the prism of Penn’s lens – or rather, his eye and brain. Sharp, sassy, sexy women in big hats, often with a Martini glass in hand. A modern city of glorious monochrome – lit to reveal unaccountable depths and detail.
In step with Richard Avedon, Penn brought new life, emotions and meanings to fashion photography. Half-hidden in his pictures is a love story. The model is often Lisa Fonssagrives; six years his senior and the ex-wife of another inventive and acute, Brodovitch-schooled photographer, Fernand Fonssagrives. While Avedon took his camera out into the street, Penn developed his world inside a studio, even if that meant taking his studio around the world with him. His portraiture introduced a new aesthetic – of extreme, sometimes imprisoning close-up – and formed our visual memory of a generation of artists and intellectuals. Picasso, Colette, Francis Bacon, Miles Davis: when we think of them, we often have a Penn shot in mind.
When photographing New Guinea mud men, Andean villagers and other ‘exotic’ inhabitants of our world, his approach and technique were essentially no different than when he was shooting, for example, Truman Capote. Democratic, inquisitive, precise.
His photographs of consumer durables and perishables have the dignified attention of, say, Velazquez immortalising a plate of fish. He had the skill and imagination to make both a laugh-out-loud picture of frozen food and deep, forensic contemplations of cigarette butts.
His nudes – barely seen from 1950 when they were made until their 2002 showing at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art – have both an abstract, formal fascination with composition and the deep appreciation of flesh and the vagaries of desire you find in, say, Lucien Freud. Penn was consistently technically expert, astute and imaginative.
His early work is often overprinted and bleached. Starting in 1964, he reintroduced the world to platinum prints. Perfectly matt with the blackest of blacks, they are almost immortal. Because of him, they are now first choice for museum-level prints. His print of a naked Kate Moss sold for $97,000 (£60,000). (Kate’s online fans voted Penn the favourite photographer of their love object, giving him 48% to Albert Watson’s 30%.)
Rarely photographed or interviewed, Penn led the most domestic of lives. In 1989, he told The Washington Post: “I’m a little commuter: I get on the train at night and go home to the country, get up at 5am and make breakfast for my wife and get back on the train. I spend most of my life with my wife and family.” His wife died three years later but, up to his death last month, on 7 October, Penn, at 92, was still living in New Jersey; still taking exceptional pictures.
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