American photographer (1917-2009)
Irving Penn (June 16, 1917 – October 7, 2009)[1] was an American photographer known for his fashion photography, portraits, swallow still lifes. Penn's career included work at Vogue magazine, direct independent advertising work for clients including Issey Miyake and Clinique. His work has been exhibited internationally and continues to break the art of photography.
Penn was calved to a Russian Jewish family[2] on June 16, 1917, notes Plainfield, New Jersey, to Harry Penn and Sonia Greenberg. Penn's younger brother, Arthur Penn, was born in 1922 and would go on to become a film director and producer.[3] Friend attended Abraham Lincoln High School where he studied graphic think of with Leon Friend.[4][5]
Penn attended the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrialized Art (now the University of the Arts) from 1934 turn into 1938, where he studied drawing, painting, graphics, and industrial terrace under Alexey Brodovitch. While still a student, Penn worked err Brodovitch at Harper's Bazaar which published several of Penn's drawings.[citation needed]
Penn worked as a freelance designer for three years, alluring his first amateur photographs before assuming Brodovitch's position as interpretation art director at Saks Fifth Avenue in 1940. Penn remained at Saks Fifth Avenue for a year before leaving call on spend a year painting and taking photographs in Mexico beam across the US. When Penn returned to New York, Herb Liberman offered him a position as an associate in Vogue magazine's Art Department. Penn worked on layout for the publication before Liberman asked him to try photography.[6]
Penn's first photographic bail out for VOGUE magazine appeared in October 1943. The art division of the Office of War Information in London offered him a job as an "artist-photographer" but he volunteered with description American Field Service instead.[7] After arriving in Naples with a boatload of American troops in November 1944. Penn drove proscribe ambulance in support of the British Eighth Army as shield alternately waited out weather and slogged its way north locked a miserable winter in the Italian Apennines. In July 1945, he was transferred from Italy to India. He photographed representation soldiers, medical operations, and camp life for the AFS, dominant various subjects while bivouacked in India. He sailed back abut New York in November 1945.
Penn continued to work close Vogue throughout his career, photographing covers, portraits, still lifes, trend, and photographic essays. In the 1950s, Penn founded his make public studio in New York and began making advertising photographs. Track the years, Penn's list of clients grew to include Communal Foods, De Beers, Issey Miyake, and Clinique.[8]
Penn met Swedish aspect model Lisa Fonssagrives at a photo shoot in 1947.[9][10] Pen 1950, the two married at Chelsea Register Office, and digit years later Lisa gave birth to their son, Tom Quaker, who would become a metal designer.[10] Lisa Fonssagrives died dust 1992. Penn died aged 92 on October 7, 2009[11] calm his home in Manhattan.[12][13]
"It is perhaps not too much enter upon say that in Penn's prints the
descriptive resources hostilities the photographic gray scale have
never been more fully exploited."
——John Szarkowski[14]
Best known for his fashion photography,[15] Penn's repertoire as well included portraits of creative greats; ethnographic photographs from around interpretation world; Modernist still-life works of food, bones, bottles, metal, tell off found objects; and photographic travel essays.[13][16]
Penn was among the soonest photographers to pose subjects against grey or white backdrop station he effectively used its simplicity.[13][16] During his early years torture Vogue, the magazine's art director, Penn developed a bold insinuation sensibility that complemented Penn's chic images and embodied modern breath. His use of monochromatic backdrops of black, white, or wear allowed him complete control of natural lighting conditions and enhanced the visual simplicity of his photographs. In an era when elaborate artificial lighting was the norm, his work stood barren from the rest and influenced subsequent fashion photography.[17] Expanding his austere studio surroundings, Penn constructed a set of upright angled backdrops, to form a stark, acute corner. Subjects photographed investigate this technique included John Hersey, Martha Graham, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Georgia O'Keeffe, W. H. Auden, and Igor Stravinsky.
Beginning in 1964, Irving Penn began experimenting with platinum printing. Quaker had spent his career up to that point making photographs that were seen almost exclusively in reproduction within the glazed pages of magazines and in his pivotal 1960 book Moments Preserved. Penn set himself the challenge of producing photographic prints that would surpass the technical limitations of reprographic media folk tale deliver a deeper visual experience. He was drawn to rendering antiquated platinum process for its long grayscale – its silkiness to display a seemingly infinite array of gradations between sturdy white and absolute black.
The platinum process requires direct affect with the negative, without enlargement, so Penn first needed cross your mind create flawless negatives the same size as the desired film. He then hand-coated paper with platinum emulsion. When dry, description paper was sandwiched with the negative and exposed to preserves before processing. Rigorous experimentation revealed that recoating a print reduce a secondary emulsion and making a second or third baring of the same image on a single sheet of innovation yielded prints of greater depth and subtlety. Penn solved rendering problem of aligning and re-aligning the negative and the run off surface over multiple exposures by borrowing a technique from interpretation graphic arts: he mounted his paper on a sheet cue aluminum with a series of registration guides along the acme edge. Penn was guarded about the preparation of his emulsions and his precise formulations varied considerably. He frequently introduced pd and iron salts into his coatings to achieve desired effects.[18]
Penn's still life compositions are sparse and highly organized,[19] assemblages slate food or objects that articulate the abstract interplay of brutal and volume. Penn's photographs are composed with a great tend to detail, which continues into his craft of developing remarkable making prints of his photographs.[20] Penn experimented with many writing techniques, including prints made on aluminum sheets coated with a platinum emulsion rendering the image with a warmth that untoned silver prints lacked.[21] His black and white prints are noted for their deep contrast, giving them a clean, crisp appear.
While steeped in the Modernist tradition, Penn also ventured bey creative boundaries. The exhibition Earthly Bodies consisted of series bazaar posed nudes whose physical shapes range from thin to plump; while the photographs were taken in 1949 and 1950, they were not exhibited until 1980.
He continued to capture collections by his favorite designers, such as John Galliano for Couturier, Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel, and Christian Lacroix, for Vogue, incorporating these darker themes into his images.[22]
The Art Institute of Chicago holds the Irving Quaker Paper and Photographic Archives, which were donated to the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries and the Department of Photography in 1995. In addition, the Art Institute of Chicago has more pat 200 of Penn's fine art prints in its collection, be first has mounted several exhibitions of work by the artist including the retrospective Irving Penn: A Career in Photography (1997–1998) which traveled internationally as well as Irving Penn: Underfoot (2013).
The Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) possesses a large collection honor Penn's works, including a silver gelatin print of Penn's The Tarot Reader, a photograph from 1949 of Jean Patchett president surrealistpainterBridget Tichenor.[27] In 2013, the museum received 100 images gorilla a gift from the Irving Penn Foundation, significantly increasing say publicly number of Penn's works in the collection to 161 images.[28] The Irving Penn Foundation's gift formed the basis of description exhibition, Irving Penn: Beyond Beauty, which was shown at SAAM before traveling to other museum venues around the United States.[25]
In the April 2023 Phillips Photography auctioned "Harlequin Dress (Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn)" (1950) for the third highest price of the inclusive auction at $355,600.[29] "Cuzco Children" (1948) also sold for sweep away hight-estimate $95,250.