Irving Penn: The Icon

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By Skyler Johnson ‘12
Arts & Entertainment Editor

Irving Penn, one of the most well-known photographers of the 20th century, died Oct. 7, 2009, at 92 in his Manhattan home. It’s sad and coincidental that he died shortly after the Getty Center in Los Angeles began an exhibition of his photographs. The exhibit, “Small Trades,” is a series of representations of working-class people in Paris, London and New York in 1950 and 1951. It began Sept. 9 and is ending Jan. 10, 2010.

Penn is known for his alternative approach to fashion photography and portraiture. He had planned to be a painter, but studied graphic design, industrial design, painting and drawing under Alexey Brodovitch at the then Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia (Now the University of Arts), according to The Columbia Encyclopedia. Brodovitch was an art director at Harper’s Bazaar magazine in New York.

His work with Brodovitch at Harper’s Bazaar marked the beginning of his career in the fashion industry. He then began working for Vogue, designing elaborate and original cover art. Penn’s work was eventually published in a 1943 Vogue magazine issue.

Penn’s minimalist style of photography and the manner in which he treated his subjects made him unique. He was one of the first photographers to use only a simple gray backdrop and the subject to create astounding portraiture. He forced his subjects, who varied from members of high society to nameless faces, into corners and against walls, indirectly exposing their flaws.

Penn utilized every aspect that lighting could offer him. He used lighting to break down the barriers between his lens and the subject. Penn successfully captured emotion in famous names like Pablo Picasso, Marlene Dietrich and Marcel Duchamp, but also of the nameless. As photographer Frances McLaughlin Gill said in Interview magazine, “The self is extremely important to him. His light enhances his subjects. ”

Along with the emotion that a person brings to a photo, Penn had the ability to bring forth the theatricals of still life. His careful, precise and unique way of placement provokes life in his objects.

Penn was unsatisfied with the conventions in the dark room and their sub-par results, so he began to experiment with his prints. He explored the tools at his disposal, like using bleach on the prints, giving human skins a rough and textured look. He created a new form of printing using platinum instead of silver in the printing process. The platinum gives a softer feel to the prints, and this invention changed the dark room results evermore. His book “Platinum Prints” contains 17 of those prints varying from fashion to the indigenous peoples of Peru and New Guinea.

Penn displayed great dedication and somewhat obsessive nature toward his prints and the subjects in them. As fashion photographer Bruce Weber said to Interview magazine, Penn took extreme caution with his prints and “he never wanted to send the pictures with an assistant; he always wanted to bring them back himself” when shooting out of town. His commitment to photography was “totally honest” and “extraordinarily pure.”