Irving Penn died on Wednesday, 7 October, aged 92. The New York Times has a full-length obituary and a slideshow of Penn’s work.
A protege and employee of Alexey Brodovitch and Alexander Liberman, Penn started off as a painter, but abandoned painting for photography in 1943. He became Vogue’s staff photographer in 1946 and photographed not only fashion for the magazine, but celebrities and portraits of ordinary people encountered on his working travels. Unlike Richard Avedon, who took models and their expensive couture outfits out into the streets and everyday life, Irving Penn photographed his models in a very minimalistic studio environment which emphasized the abstract shapes of the clothing against the negative space of the backdrop. A superb technician, he revived the nearly forgotten technique of platinum printing in the 1960s, which gave his prints a very rich luminous and textural quality.
I’ve always admired Penn’s work for its strong graphic composition, both in the value scales and its use of strong negative and positive shapes. His work always had an intellectual cool to it, with a very controlled revelry in sensuousness. I also admired his ability to fulfill commercial assignments and pursue personal photographic projects at the same high level of quality and interest. His nude torso series of the 1940s and ’50s had the quality of ancient Greek statuary, with the visual texture of worn marble and travertine.
The still life above comes from his series of illustrations of Jeffrey Steingarten’s food articles for Vogue during the 1990s. His color still lifes were wonderful for the surprising combination of items and the way he always included an element that ensured the still life adhered to the classic memento mori origins of the genre. This element could be found in such items as a green snake looping through a composition, or the decay of the flowers and smashed cigarette butts series. You could almost say his still lifes had an elegant gross-out factor!
