As you may have read in the papers, photographer Irving Penn died last night at his Manhattan home, aged 92.
Born in Plainfield, New Jersey, in 1917, Penn studied design at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art.
After moving to New York in the early 40s, Penn worked under Vogue magazine art director Alexander Liberman.
It was Liberman who encouraged him to take his first colour photograph – a still life that included a brown bag, a scarf, gloves, oranges and lemons – which ultimately became the October 1, 1943, cover of Vogue.
Penn left the magazine in 1944 to join the army, and returned to Vogue two years after, taking up travel and fashion assignments.
In 1950 he married fashion model Lisa Fonssagrives who soon became one of his favourite subjects and muses.
In the meantime the photographer started taking unique portraits in a corner built out of movable walls within his studio.
From the 50s he became famous for his portraits of celebrities – among them also Pablo Picasso, Georgia O’Keeffe, Salvador Dali, T. S. Eliot, Truman Capote, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Aaron Copland, Richard Rodgers, and Oscar Hammerstein II – and of ordinary people.
As a young man, Penn dreamt of becoming a painter one day and this passion for painting was transferred in a way onto his photographs.
His shoots for Vogue often turned into still lives, while in his portraits there was a sort of minimalist beauty that captured the essence of his subjects in the light of his studio and reached out to the magazine readers, engaging them in a personal dialogue with that specific image.
His distinctive essential style became instantly recognisable and, throughout the decades, it helped defining a new aesthetic for contemporary photography.
Penn took photographs of models, tribesmen, hippies and everyday objects – from cigarette butts and discarded clothing to the detritus from the streets of Manhattan.
You could easily state that Penn’s images illustrated and defined the cultural history of the 20th century. One of the most recent exhibitions that featured his work was “Extreme Beauty in Vogue”, organised at Milan's Palazzo della Ragione in May. An entire section of the exhibition was dedicated to Penn and to his exotic and colourful face transformations.
Though I love Penn's fashion images, there is one photograph I particularly like that doesn't have anything to do with fashion, but looks rather stylish: it's a group photographs portraying dancer Tanaquil LeClercq with members of the Ballet Society and LeClercq's husband as well, choreographer George Balanchine. I love her ethereal beauty in the picture: LeClercq looks like a sort of goddess in her draped costume and her elegant pose contrasts with the relaxed and natural look on the three men surrounding her.
Penn will be obviously missed, but it's great to know that his style and ideals of beauty will keep on inspiring and influencing future generations or artists and photographers.
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