Legacy MattersElegant was the word for Irving Penn, the fashion photographer who died at 92.
"He never stopped working," said Peter MacGill, a longtime friend whose Pace-MacGill Galleries in Manhattan represented Penn's work. "He would go back to similar subjects and never see them the same way twice."
Penn, who constantly explored the photographic medium and its boundaries, typically preferred to isolate his subjects – from fashion models to Aborigine tribesmen – from their natural settings to photograph them in a studio against a stark background. He believed the studio could most closely capture their true natures.
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"A beautiful print is a thing in itself, not just a halfway house on the way to the page," he once said. Accordingly, he spent countless hours in his studio creating prints with costly platinum salts – a process that had been mostly abandoned at the turn of the 20th century, but favoured by Penn because of its glowing results. (Most photographic prints use a solution of silver on the paper rather than platinum.)
Parting Glance: Irving Penn, a slideshow. My favorite is this portrait of Colette, the French novelist.
New York Times obituary by Andy Grundberg
Irving Penn, one of the 20th century’s most prolific and influential photographers of fashion and the famous, whose signature blend of classical elegance and cool minimalism was recognizable to magazine readers and museumgoers worldwide, died on Wednesday at his home in Manhattan.
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A courtly man whose gentle demeanor masked an intense perfectionism, Mr. Penn adopted the pose of a humble craftsman while helping to shape a field known for putting on airs. Schooled in painting and design, he chose to define himself as a photographer, scraping paint off his early canvases so they could serve a more useful life as backdrops to his pictures.
He was also a refined conversationalist and a devoted husband and friend. His marriage to Lisa Fonssagrives, a leading model, an artist and his sometime collaborator, lasted 42 years, until her death at the age of 80 in 1992. Mr. Penn’s photographs of Fonssagrives captured a slim woman of sophistication and radiant good health and set the aesthetic standard for the elegant fashion photography of the 1940s and ’50s.
Penn expressed himself and his subjects best through a Shaker-style restraint.
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Two decades later he expanded on these portraits during trips to Dahomey (now Benin), to Morocco, to New Guinea and elsewhere, using a portable studio to provide a textured but seamless background. The pictures, both in color and in black and white, were featured annually in Vogue. In 1974 they were published in “Worlds in a Small Room,” which seemed to emphasize the perseverance of cultural diversity. Mr. Penn was also capable of making Western culture seem strange and fascinating. In the early 1950s he made a series of portraits of tradesmen in Paris, London and New York. Again relying on his spare studio to separate his subjects from their surroundings, he nevertheless insisted that the tradesmen wear the clothes and tools of their work: pastry chefs in white aprons and toques hold rolling pins; a fishmonger carries a fish in one hand and a rag in the other.