DAY 63

FAMOUS PHOTOGRAPHERS

Irving Penn (1917–2009)

PRACTICALLY PERFECT IN EVERY WAY

Irving Penn set the standards for fashion photography of the 1940s and 1950s with his signature style of cool, austere elegance created with key elements, including a smooth, neutral background, natural lighting, and minimal props. His images were timeless portraits of fashion and celebrity, where the focus of the image remained solely on his subject. One defining technique he used was a background created by wedging two walls against one another to create a narrow corner. Truman Capote, Spencer Tracy, Pablo Picasso, and Martha Graham were among the list of people squeezed into this narrow corner over the years.

His career began at Vogue in 1943, where he became the photographer with the longest tenure, creating more than 150 covers over a 50-year period. In a career that spanned more than six decades, he produced fashion photographs and portraits, as well as carefully detailed still life ensembles, and ethnographic studies of tribesmen around the world.

Penn was known to be a perfectionist and a consummate technician who considered craftsmanship and attention to detail to be his highest priority. His prints were created with a time-consuming, turn-of-the-century darkroom process, using platinum instead of silver to create a lustrous, velvety finish with incredibly rich depth, a process he taught himself and single-handedly brought back into popularity.¹

Clarity, composition, and care pervade each and every image he created, whether the subject was a bowl of cigarette butts or the Duchess of Windsor. (For more about Penn, see page 154.) —GC