Out of this world 2: Irving Penn

“A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart, and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it; it is in one word, effective.”

Irving Penn

Irving Penn, who said he never wanted to “be a personage,” was nevertheless one of the twentieth century’s great artists, a photographer with a style so uniquely his own that it had already earned its own “aesthetic copyright,”as Vogue put it, by 1948—when the jeans-and-sneakers-wearing Jersey boy had been working for the magazine for only three years.

Mr. Penn, as he is still respectfully remembered in the halls at 4 Times Square, worked for Vogue for seven decades. He shot everything: fashion, still lifes, movie stars, food, nudes, flowers, makeup—and 158 covers. Lined up along gallery walls, his portraits alone would form a rich visual history of the cultural life of the twentieth century. Mostly, these were taken in a specially built set that forced the sitter’s body into a corner and, often, his or her id out into the open.

Reclusive, formal, unfailingly proper, producing meticulous work with an air of intimacy and spontaneity, Penn, was - and is - often described as a quintessentially American photographer.

http://www.vogue.com/voguepedia/Irving_Penn

"The ideal commercial photograph is one that is highly sensual. It is however a controlled and used sensuality. (...) As a matter of fact, advertising clients of successful companies seem to value the sensual picture more than editors of magazines do, because they know that is a way to get at buying the public."

Irving Penn

http://vogue.tumblr.com/post/35147273731/balenciaga-spring-2006-photographed-by-irving

"This is of course problem A in portrait photography - to get past the facade that people would like to present."

Irving Penn

"It's painful and very exhausting. It's a kind of surgery; you cut an incision into their lives, you move into their circumstances and then you pin them down while you penetrate even further into their personalities. It's the most painful kind of photography and after almost every sitting I wish I hadn't gotten into that kind of thing. It's a matter of controlling a person and yet wanting not to control him too much so that he can still reveal something that is true of himself."

[Irving Penn about photographing famous people]

http://www.pixel77.com/artist-of-the-week-photography-titan-irving-penn/

http://artblart.com/2012/09/06/exhibition-irving-penn-diverse-worlds-at-moderna-museet-malmo-sweden/

“In portrait photography there is something more profound that we seek inside a person, while being painfully aware that a limitation of our medium is that the inside is recordable only insofar as it apparent on the outside.”

Irving Penn

Irving Penn was one of the first photographers to adopt this style, rather than shooting his subjects in the more elaborate studio settings more favoured at the time. It was in 47 and 48 that Penn shot a whole series of images that broke the conventional mould of studio portraiture forever. He photographed his subjects sandwiched between two angled boards that formed a ‘V’ shape that naturally leads the eye towards them as the perspective narrowed. He also shot his subjects sitting on bare carpet in an empty studio, often arranged at odd angles and positions. This method was totally new and broke all the conventions of studio portraiture, it was a brand new way of photographing people without props and one that we take very much for granted now.