https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irving_Penn
https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-me-irving-penn8-2009oct08-story.html
http://www.aaulens.com/ph-692/2017/9/18/irving-penn-and-platinum-printing
his marvellous missus ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisa_Fonssagrives
a point-of-view appreciation by tom zimberoff ...
Last February, I was happy to discover a seasonal encomium published in The New Yorker for a portrait by Irving Penn (1917 - 2009).
In the “Photo Booth” section of the magazine, writer Rachel Symes marked the onset of frigid winter weather by citing her perennial touchstone: Penn’s depiction of a giant man, “swaddled in a colossal polar-bear coat, and [his wife] so tiny, in her pert black suit and pearls.” I encourage you to read her beautifully evocative writing. But halfway into the first paragraph, she pushed my curmudgeon button with the word snapshot she used to describe the photograph. I had to scold her.
Maybe she was thinking of a “snapshot in time,” given the sitters’ dated getup. Still, to call such a deliberately executed photograph a snapshot — indeed, a work of art by one of portraiture’s greatest exponents — was insensitive. A snapshot is, unambiguously, a perfunctory expression of photographic technology with little regard for the inherent value of the photograph itself, other than sentimentality. And a vintage snapshot at that! Does one appreciate a Vermeer because it’s old? Besides, vintage means something specific contextually to photographers and collectors; and it doesn’t necessarily imply age. It refers to prints created contemporaneously, or nearly so, with their corresponding negatives. Sure, it’s more likely that prints made from film are of an age. But I digress. The article went on to say, “Penn used the same austere style for all his subjects, shooting them with a bank of lights …”
Actually, Penn used natural light for this and virtually all his studio portraits; a window, a skylight actually, whose grimy and north-facing panes could neither incandesce nor flash as implied by the writer’s use of the phrase “bank of lights.” And far from being austere, Penn’s light was soft. It came from the north, to avoid the east-to-west transit and direct glare of the sun. Picture a painter’s atelier in your mind’s eye. Penn did. He used this “northlight” to caress his subjects (very much like Vermeer or Rembrandt), and to emphasize shapes and contrast by exploiting shadow where light was absent. This technique, together with a plain backdrop to isolate his subjects, and an almost gratuitous but genius inclusion of scratchy bolts of canvas, defined a sui generis motif.
Penn’s compositions were austere (if not his lighting), but in a minimalist sense. His subjects wore sober expressions and posed with meticulously arranged but spare props and wardrobe (sometimes street garb, sometimes couture, sometimes nothing at all), surrounded by empty space within a two-dimensional frame. Their postures suggest an almost architectural sensibility. Penn conceived portraiture as the still-life of living beings; and his actual still-life studies of cosmetics, foodstuffs, and close-up studies of detritus found in the street appear, to me, as portraits of inanimate things.
Iwish writers without firsthand experience practicing photography, no matter how much they admire it, would not try to deconstruct it. This happens often; particularly because few people under the age of forty have seen an actual photograph, having gotten used to seeing images: the simulacra of photographs on screens, on pages in print, and, of course, glossy snapshots. It’s rare to see a matted, mounted, signed, luminous, exquisitely textured, museum-quality photograph sized to scale, whether hanging on a wall under glass in a frame or otherwise.
persons ...
in peru ...
colour still life, 1947 ...
still life, 1977 ...
cornered portraits ...
dancers and co ...
haute couture ...
platinum prints ? ... memento mori ?
https://youtu.be/PxFlLyNRM0w
flowers and fruit, whatever ...
and irving penn quite definitely had a sense of humour ...
the MET in New York have a huge collection of Penn's work
you can skim through the catalogue online to get some idea of the scope of his career and interests ...
https://www.metmuseum.org/search-results#!/search?q=irving%20penn&orderByCountDesc=true&page=1&searchFacet=All%20Results
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