Irving Penn

Irving Penn

1917–2009

Irving Penn was so exacting a photographer that he once famously gathered 500 lemons to find just the right one—and then shot it 500 times to get a perfect image. Working primarily for Vogue, for which he shot more than 150 covers, Penn employed an austere sensibility that helped transform commercial photography into high art.

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“He stumbled into the job almost by accident,” said the Associated Press. Born in Plainfield, N.J., Penn studied art and tried his hand at painting. But realizing his limitations, he joined the design staff of Harper’s Bazaar and later Vogue. Never satisfied with how photographers shot his cover designs, he was told to try shooting them himself. His first cover shot for Vogue, in October 1943, was the magazine’s first still-life cover: a “striking” composition of “a brown leather bag, a beige scarf, gloves, oranges, and lemons arranged in the shape of a pyramid.” Penn subsequently refined his minimalist style by placing “models and fashion accessories against clean backdrops,” eschewing the customary clutter “that tended to draw attention from the clothes themselves.”

Penn placed his work “in a stripped-down world of his own making, almost abstract in its rigorous simplicity,” said The Boston Globe. This was especially true of his portraits of Pablo Picasso, Spencer Tracy, Joe Louis, the Duchess of Windsor, and Truman Capote, among other famous figures. Many of them he “literally ‘cornered’ in his studio, placing them between two gray walls joined at an acute angle,” usually resulting in “a cool, even appraisal that neither assaults nor caresses the sitter.” For maximum effect, Penn used “the palladium platinum process for printing his photographs, a dauntingly exacting technique that produces lustrous, almost painterly results.”

Penn had a legendary “contrary streak,” said the Los Angeles Times. Though known mainly for shooting models and celebrities, ordinary people were often the subject of his personal work; in the early 1950s, he produced a memorable series of 252 images of butchers, bakers, and other tradesmen. “He traveled widely, carrying his own studio to the ends of the earth to photograph Peruvians in native dress, veiled Moroccan women, or the Mudmen of New Guinea.” A 1975 show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York was devoted to cigarette butts; two years later, in “Street Material” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he focused on crushed paper cups, rags, and other urban debris. “A beautiful print is a thing in itself,” he explained.

Penn’s wife of 42 years, Lisa Fonssagrives, died in 1992; among his survivors is his brother, Arthur, the film director.