Amy's Expansive Corner

Caitlin Burke

In Homage To...

Irving Penn

Irving Penn was born in New Jersey. From 1934-38 he studied at the Philadelphia Museum School where Alexey Brodovitch taught design. Penn worked for Harper's Bazaar during his final two summer vacations as an apprentice artist, and on graduation he joined Junior League magazine as an art director. A few years later he had saved enough to take a year off to paint in Mexico, but he soon realised he was never going to be a great painter.

On his return to New York, Alex Libermann gave him a job with Vogue, where he was supposed to come up with cover ideas for their photographers. When the photographers were reluctant to try his suggestions, Penn borrowed a camera and set up a still-life shot which appeared as a Vogue cover in October 1943.

Penn returned to Vogue after a couple of years serving with the American Field Service in Italy and soon established himself as one of the most versatile of photographers, excelling in fashion, advertising, editorial and also travel photography, and more recntly in television. Much of his best work was however in the field of portraiture.

Penn's first book was Moments Preserved in (1960), but he became much better known for his classic Worlds in a Small Room (1974). Penn has always had an interest in the process of photography, becoming technically expert in the use of cameras of virtually every type and format, using techniques such as mutiple exposure and also making use of different printing processes including platinum. Platinum printing had been one of the processes preferred by the artistic photographers of the turn of the century for small soft-focus pictorial works. Penn created large and highly detailed blow-ups of such apparently unpictorial matter as the contents of an ash try.

Source: Notable Photographers at About.com

Links

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston