Irving penn photographer vogue
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Still life work flourishes, returns to flowers and nudes as subjects, pursues complex technical experiments with cameras and printing, in addition to painting, drawing, and printing.
Penn travels to Paris to photograph the haute couture collections for the last time.
Donates majority of his archives and 130 fine art prints to the Art Institute of Chicago.
"Irving Penn: A Career in Photography" retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago.
"Earthly Bodies: Irving Penn Nudes, 1949–50" exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Simultaneously, "Dancer: 1999 Nudes" exhibition held at the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Publishes A Notebook at Random.
Photographs his 165th Vogue cover.
Establishes The Irving Penn Foundation.
Returns to flowers as a photographic subject.
Irving Penn dies at his home in New York, at the age of 92.
Irving Penn is widely acknowledged as one of the most important and influential photographers of the twentieth century.
In his six decade career, Penn was able to combine the precision of seeing with the invention of form.
Penn was not only an exceptional portraitist and a master of still life, but he was also a great innovator of fashion photography.
His fashion work bridged the gap between art and commerce and helped redefine the language of fashion photography in the process.
He shot a remarkable 165 cover photos for Vogue over sixty years – making him the most prolific photographer in the magazine’s history.
He was one of the first photographers to shoot against a simple plain background – a technique that is now used in every studio around the world.
Penn’s ability to use light, shadow, and space to produce still lifes and portraits that are both evocative and provocative is masterful.
In this article, we’ll be taking a closer look at the work of one of the great masters of twentieth-century photography, Mr.
Irving Penn.
Related: 30 Brilliant Irving Penn Quotes to Bookmark
Editor note: If you find our Irving Penn profile helpful then we would be grateful if you could share it with others. The picture is a detailed study of the most disposable object. Penn recognized that many of these jobs would soon vanish, so he wanted to capture all the traditional professions associated with the city, from charwomen and fishmongers to seamstresses and lorry washers.
Irving Penn succeeded in removing the unnecessary and highlighting the essential in his photographs, by connecting art with body movement.
He was known as the "master of photography" and a "revolutionary in fashion and advertising photography," with his works studied by students in printing schools worldwide.
Between Vogue assignments, Penn continued to experiment with his work.
The images were a typical example of the stylistic principles and overall work that Irving Penn advocated. This carpet became a recurring element in many of his works during that period, appearing in various color combinations. From his early student years, Penn wanted to become an artist. Another famous project by Penn was "Small Trades," which consisted of numerous portraits of workers in uniform, holding attributes of their profession or craft.
A few of his early images were printed as illustrations in Harper’s Bazaar.
From 1940 and 1941 he worked as an advertising designer for the Saks Fifth Avenue department store. When Penn came back from his trip, he was hired by the legendary art director Alexander Lieberman as an associate to make layout work for Vogue magazine.
When Penn expressed disappointment that the staff photographers at the magazine did not like his suggestions for cover photographs, Lieberman encouraged him to begin taking his own.
He later destroyed all his Mexican paintings.
Upon returning to New York, Irving Penn interviewed and once again became an art editor, this time for the popular publication Vogue. Penn would eventually photograph 165 covers for Vogue over sixty years.
During the war years, Penn served as an ambulance driver and photographer in the American Field Service with the British Army in India and Italy.
In 1948, following a photographic assignment for Vogue in Peru, Penn stayed behind to spend Christmas in the historic city of Cuzco.
His photographs of her frequently show her slim elegance, placed in the center of the frame with few props.
Finding his Style
Penn also worked on a series of “small trades” people. He continued to use the same model right until the end of his career, some sixty years later.
For his studio work for Vogue, Penn frequently used a Deardorff large format view camera (both the 4×5 and 8×10 models).
Penn began using a 35mm Leica camera for his travel assignments for Vogue in 1950.
In the late 1950s, Penn switched from Leica to a Nikon, trading the rangefinder-style Leica camera for the newer single-lens reflex design and the telephoto lens.
In a burst of romantic passion for this new apparatus (forgetting gratitude to the Leica and with even a certain amount of disloyalty) I diverted myself of all our studios elaborate and superb Leica equipment, taking a terrible financial beating in the process, not finding a panacea and exchanging one set of headaches for another.
Irving Penn
Penn would later come to appreciate the flexibility of the new system and continue to use it for the rest of his career.
In 1979, Penn picked up a Banquet camera, a large format view camera, that was popular in the early twentieth century for taking group portraits in formal situations.
What Film Did Penn Use?
Penn mainly used Kodak black and white film for his portraits, either Super XX, Plus-X, or Tri-X (it seems any Kodak film with an X).
For his fashion, beauty, and still-life photography he preferred to use color film.
After looking at my notes and reviewing his contact sheets it looks like he used both Fuji and Kodak for his color work. For the project, he visited New York, Paris, and London and photographed unrecognized tradespeople including young butchers, a coalman, a telegraph messenger, pastry cooks, and even a balloon seller, all posing formally in their work clothes and holding the tools of their trade.
It was this series that saw the genesis of what was to become characteristic of his portrait style: subjects posed against a plain background.
However, he only stayed at Saks for a short period, after which he took a year off for painting and taking photographs in Mexico and across the United States. From Japan and Crete to Spain, Nepal, Cameroon, New Guinea, and Morocco, Penn captured portraits of people in natural light.
After a trip to Cusco, Penn photographed the inhabitants and people from the neighboring mountain villages, using only a simple backdrop and natural illumination.
From then on, Penn began taking photographs himself, proving through his work that minimalism was synonymous with luxury. In his studio, he had floor to ceiling glass and large skylights installed.
If the light wasn’t strong enough (or there wasn’t any window light available) then he would augment the existing light or replicate window light with either tungsten, strobes, and even cheap hardware clamp lights.
Penn believed that this captured their true nature. He even ruined the works he made and saw them as inadequate.
While attending the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Arts, Irving met Alexey Brodovitch at Harper’s Bazaar.