Irving Penn

[irvingpenn]

Conclusion

Penn turned the still life into a high art.  He was an instinctive romantic, who, through force of spirit and originality of style, took by storm the art world.  Penn was also a gem of purest ray serene, he was  an instinctive popular classicist, with a magical gift for visual rhythm, for making something insignificant—a pattern of cigarettes and ashes, each ash miraculously in its one best place—a broken plate with cherries punctuating its white formality, look as formally inevitable as an eighteenth century still-life. Whether it was Forgotten Fruit, or Sewing Machine with 13 Objects, each work had this penchant for poise and passion for panache.

Photography can be many things to many people. For Penn a still life was more than just a study of objects. Feeling was the determining factor in his works-and a pair of cigarette butts could evince that feeling…Penn created a formidable study of still lifes, replete with ravishing edges and perfect composition and a quality of deep colour that was the envy of every other photographer. What withstands the test of time is the vein of humane insight in his work, too. Penn was a consummate technician, known equally for the immaculate descriptive quality of his still-life arrangements of consumer goods and for his masterly exploration of photographic materials. Compositional clarity vied with spare elegance.

[irvingpenn]

Penn’s style

Indeed, Penn was a camera master, yielding technically perfect images and tossing wet blankets at the common still life of fruit or flowers. The first auction to focus exclusively on his still lifes, this will introduce Penn’s art to new viewers. It gives photographers seeking new ways to work much to ponder-because very few photographers make the effort to capture still lifes.

[irvingpenn]

Poppy, Glowing Embers (New York), 1968

A single shot of a Poppy is another masterpiece in the concentration of a single creation of nature’s wonders. When he had his show at Marlborough Gallery at Chelsea, Penn explained in his introduction that his series of colour studies published in 1980 as Flowers were made over seven summers from 1967 to 1973.Of this study he said: “I can claim no special knowledge of horticulture that the reader might believe he has a right to expect of someone making a book of flowers. I even confess to enjoying that ignorance since it has left me free to react with simple pleasure just to form and colour.”

[irvingpenn]

PHOTOGRAPHY ELEMENTS

What is a still life?

At best a study in elegant minimalism. Interestingly, Still Life as a subject has one of the most formative signatures of understanding the impact of creating a language from the collection of everyday objects. Penn created a series from objects and the idea of materialist echoing its own nuances. Perhaps this is seen in his work Bread, Salt and Water which is one of the works at Christie’s. Three substances rather as well as objects of different degrees of cohesive compositions like the sandy texture of salt, the grainy viscosity  of bread and the transparent purity of a glass of water all stand and talk to each other in a visible ensemble of sorts.

Penn has contributed a poignant yet powerful array in the study of still lifes.

[irvingpenn]

The Hasselblad award  

The Hasselblad award was presented for the fifth time on Monday 23 September 1985. The award winner, Irving Penn, New York City, received the award from Her Royal Highness Princess Désirée, at a ceremony at Börsen, the former stock exchange in Göteborg. The award sum was USD 20,000. In conjunction with the ceremony an exhibit of the award winner’s photographs was displayed at Börsen.

[irvingpenn]

Platinum Prints

1990: Irving Penn: Platinum Test Material, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona

[irvingpenn]

Beyond Beauty

2015-2016: Irving Penn: Beyond Beauty, career retrospective of 146 photographs at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

[irvingpenn]

Exhibitions

1975: Irving Penn: Recent Works, Photographs of Cigarettes, Museum of Modern Art, New York

[irvingpenn]

Worlds in a Small Room

Penn's second book, entirely in black and white, focuses on his work as an "ambulant studio photographer," photographing people around the world over twenty years.

[irvingpenn]

Flowers

This book is a selection of photographs Penn made for Vogue Christmas issues between 1967 and 1973, of seven different flower varieties: poppies, tulips, roses, lilies, peonies, orchids, and begonias. Penn's sensitivity and eye for form is apparent in these detailed, close-up images which bring the flowers to life, even when he captures them as "they have already begun spotting and browning and twisting on their way back to the earth." Due to the costs of printing in color, it took almost ten years for Penn to be able to find a publisher for this book.

[irvingpenn]

Still Life: Irving Penn Photographs, 1938–2000

This book gathers Penn's work in the still life genre, so central to his art, from 1938 until 2001. It opens with an introduction by John Szarkowski, who places Penn within the larger context of artists working in still life. Penn oversaw the design and production.

[irvingpenn]

Irving Penn Publication

A Notebook at Random

This untraditional monograph offers an intimate perspective into Penn's way of seeing the world, tracing connections and inspirations across his professional assignments, printing, and paintings. Interested in presenting a fresh angle on his work across different times, genres, and media, Penn assembled a dynamic and diverse group of images that enter into dialogue with one another across the pages.

[irvingpenn]

Mouth (for L'Oreal)

In an advertisement for a L'Oreal lipstick campaign of 1986, Penn isolated the most relevant detail of the subject and shot it at close range (one of Penn's go-to moves). Using a dye transfer print process, Penn developed the face in black and white and confined the vivid color to the center, displaying the full spectrum of colors in L'Oreal's spring lipstick line in a configuration resembling a painter's palette. Not only does this allow the potential customer to choose from an array of shades, but the application of color is essentially an abstract painting. Unconventional strokes of deep purple and vibrant yellow go outside the lines. Implicitly L'Oreal's new product is more than just a lipstick. It's a form of personal expression, on the brink of art. The visual point, made quickly and unforgettably, encapsulates everything that made Penn great, both as an artist and an advertiser. At this point in his career, Penn was also clearly thinking of his advertising as art. He published these prints as a limited edition for sale to contemporary art collectors.

[irvingpenn]

Cigarette No. 37  1972, printed 1974

Penn experimented with photographic and printing processes throughout his career. The Platinum-Palladium print process, an old photographic method he revived, enabled Penn to achieve the level of tonal precision seen here. Cigarette No. 37 is part of a series of cigarette butts shot at close range using a macro lens in the 1970s. In the absence of the context where one might usually find it (an ashtray, a gutter, or the street), the everyday form becomes large and mysterious, like an ancient ruin. This series inspired a larger investigation of detritus found on the street, including disintegrated work gloves, banana peels, and chewing gum. Entitled Street Material, this whole genre of his work was exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1977. This solidified Penn's reputation as a serious artist, not merely a fashion photographer.

[irvingpenn]

Nude No. 150, New York 1949-50

Nude No 150 depicts the lower half of a female body shaped differently from the ideal that appears in Penn's fashion shoots. The triangular thighs seem to sprout directly from the spherical abdomen. The overexposed negative creates an almost abstract image comprised of shapes and sinuous lines closer to a drawing or a sculpture. Penn would soon use this device in his fashion photographs. While supporting himself as a fashion photographer, Penn engaged in side projects that interested him as an artist. Earthly Bodies series was among the first of these side projects. At work, Penn's job was to emphasize and exaggerate the ideal female form. Earthly Bodies presents us with an antidote to these "heavenly" bodies Penn was obliged to photograph on a daily basis, resisting this ideal.

[irvingpenn]

Truman Capote 1948

Few, if any, precedents for this pose exist in the history of portraiture. This masterful, claustrophobic portrait of Truman Capote is one of the so-called "corner portraits" that formed the basis for Penn's emerging reputation as a fine art photographer. Two slanted walls surround the American writer who is scrunched down into a chair with his hands shoved into the pockets of his trench coat. Though the chopped-up space and pose do not seem natural or comfortable, they feel immediate, even intimate, in ways a conventional pose might not be. Penn understood that cornering his subjects heightened the psychological intensity, stating, "A niche closed people in.

[irvingpenn]

Summer Sleep  1949-50, printed 1985

Penn’s, art photography and commercial photography were two distinctly different fields. Penn brought them closer together. This photograph was published as an illustration of an article in Vogue's June 1949 issue. A fan blows quietly on a woman who has fallen asleep. Near her are a book, a peach, a cup of tea, and a fly-swatter. The flies on the screen are so much in focus one has the urge to flick them away. The image in the background fades out, an excellent metaphor for the loss of consciousness.