Irving Penn

Irving Penn (June 16, 1917 – October 7, 2009) was an American photographer celebrated for his fashion work, portraiture, and still lifes. He spent much of his career at *Vogue* and also took on independent advertising assignments for brands like Issey Miyake and Clinique. His photographs have been shown around the world and continue to influence photography as an art form.

Penn was born in Plainfield, New Jersey, to Harry Penn and Sonia Greenberg, a Russian Jewish family. His younger brother, Arthur Penn, born in 1922, became a noted film director and producer. Penn studied graphic design under Leon Friend at Abraham Lincoln High School. In 1938, he earned a diploma from the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art (now the University of the Arts), where he studied drawing, painting, graphics, and industrial arts under Alexey Brodovitch. While still a student, he worked for Brodovitch at *Harper’s Bazaar*, which published several of his drawings.

After school, Penn worked as a freelance designer for three years and took his first amateur photographs. In 1940, he took over Brodovitch’s former role as art director at Saks Fifth Avenue. He stayed for a year, then left to spend a year painting and photographing in Mexico and across the United States. Upon returning to New York, Alexander Liberman hired him as an associate in *Vogue*’s Art Department. Penn worked on layouts until Liberman asked him to try photography. His first photographic cover for *Vogue* appeared in October 1943. He was offered a job as an “artist-photographer” with the Office of War Information in London, but instead volunteered with the American Field Service. In November 1944, he arrived in Naples with American troops and drove an ambulance for the British Eighth Army through a harsh winter in the Italian Apennines. In July 1945, he was transferred to India, where he photographed soldiers, medical operations, and camp life for the AFS, as well as various subjects while stationed there. He returned to New York in November 1945.

Penn remained at *Vogue* for the rest of his career, shooting covers, portraits, still lifes, fashion, and photographic essays. In the 1950s, he opened his own New York studio and began making advertising photographs. His client list eventually included General Foods, De Beers, Issey Miyake, and Clinique. He married his first wife, Nonny Gardner from England, in 1940; they had met as students at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art. They divorced in 1943. In 1947, Penn met Swedish fashion model Lisa Fonssagrives at a photo shoot. They married in 1950 at Chelsea Register Office, and their son, Tom Penn, was born two years later. Tom became a metal designer. Lisa died in 1992. Penn died at age 92 on October 7, 2009, at his Manhattan home.

Though best known for fashion photography, Penn’s work also included portraits of creative figures, ethnographic photographs from around the world, Modernist still lifes of food, bones, bottles, metal, and found objects, and photographic travel essays. He was one of the first photographers to pose subjects against a simple gray or white backdrop, using that starkness to his advantage. During his early years as *Vogue*’s art director, he developed a bold graphic style that complemented his chic images and embodied modern taste. His use of black, white, or gray backgrounds gave him full control over natural light and heightened the visual simplicity of his pictures. At a time when elaborate artificial lighting was standard, his approach stood out and influenced later fashion photography. He also built a set of upright angled backdrops to create a sharp, acute corner, using this setup for portraits of subjects including John Hersey, Martha Graham, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Georgia O’Keeffe, W. H. Auden, and Igor Stravinsky.

Starting in 1964, Penn experimented with platinum printing. Until then, his photographs were mostly seen in reproduction in magazines and in his 1960 book *Moments Preserved*. He wanted to create prints that surpassed the limits of reprographic media and offered a richer visual experience. He was drawn to the old platinum process for its long grayscale—its ability to show a vast range of gradations between pure white and absolute black. Because platinum printing requires direct contact with the negative without enlargement, Penn first had to make flawless negatives the same size as the final print. He hand-coated paper with platinum emulsion, let it dry, then sandwiched it with the negative and exposed it to light before processing. Through careful experimentation, he found that recoating a print with a second emulsion and making a second or third exposure on the same sheet produced greater depth and subtlety. To align the negative and print surface over multiple exposures, he borrowed a technique from graphic arts: mounting the paper on an aluminum sheet with registration guides along the top edge. Penn kept his emulsion formulas secret, and his precise mixtures varied, often including palladium and iron salts to achieve specific effects.

His still life compositions are sparse and highly organized.