"Sensitive people faced with the prospect of a camera portrait put on a face they think is one they would like to show the world. ...Very often what lies behind the facade is rare and more wonderful than the subject knows or dares to believe." — Irving Penn, 1975.
Irving Penn started life wanting to be a painter. At the age of 25 he gave up his job and headed to Mexico to see if he could live his dream. Unfortunately he realised fairly quickly this wasn't going to happen. He returned to New York and got a job assisting Alexander Liberman the then Art Director of Vogue. His role was to come up with designs for the front cover of American Vogue (1943). He was encouraged to developed his ideas further by taking pictures of his own drawings and designs. This eventually led Penn to established himself as fashion photographer, the rest is history.
Fashion
Penn's style of photography can be described as elegant and refined with a concealed complexity.
"to think of myself, a contemporary fashion photographer, as stemming directly from painters of fashion back through the centuries." Irving Penn
This statement is the biggest indicator of how Penn approached his compositions. Regardless of what Penn was taking he would employ the same technical excellence and attention to detail. His images were always pin sharp capturing clean lines with lighting that was always engineered under strict studio conditions.
"to think of myself, a contemporary fashion photographer, as stemming directly from painters of fashion back through the centuries." Irving Penn
This statement is the biggest indicator of how Penn approached his compositions. Regardless of what Penn was taking he would employ the same technical excellence and attention to detail. His images were always pin sharp capturing clean lines with lighting that was always engineered under strict studio conditions.
Portraiture
Penn didn't just confine himself to fashion, he had many other photographic interests. He was also renowned for his portraiture work with celebrities. He would make them sit for hours until he drew out the real personality, the real them (see quote above). Yet again he would use plain backdrops with natural northern light for simplistic sophisticated images.
Picasso 1957
Another technique Penn employed was to use two backgrounds to form a corner. He would hem his subject in - different sitters reacted differently to the situation they found themselves in. Some felt secure, some felt trapped, all to be caught on film by Penn.
Marcel Duchamp 1948
When Penn did uses props it was always to enhance the subject. He once bought an old rug and used this in combination with a backdrop. The rug was thrown over large boxes and the sitter was placed on the rug. The tonality of the rug merged with the back drop and was perfect for highlighting the sitter's face.
Alfred Hitchcock 1947
Nudes
Another of Penn's interests were nudes. He began his personal project in 1949. His approach was different from his commercial work. The technique he devised was to bleach and re-develop each print to create high contrast areas. This helped highlight the contours of the sitter. Penn spent time positioning the sitter so that he could capture the weightiness of the figure which was the antithesis of his fashion images.
Still Life
Featured on Penn's first cover of Vogue was a still life brown leather bag, beige scarf and gloves, lemons, oranges, and a huge topaz. Throughout his career Penn produced a fascinating portfolio of still life images from commercial product shots to more challenging subject matter. In the 1970's Penn produce a series of images of urban waste. These images capture the beauty in the discarded items. The simplicity of these images was a combination of the light applied and the plain backgrounds. He had the knack of turning the most oblivious disused item into a thing of beauty.
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