American photographer Irving Penn, (1917-2009) made art for over 70 years. In October, The Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C., celebrates his work with Irving Penn: Beyond Beauty, at the American Art Museum (8th and F Streets, N.W.,1st floor West) until March 2016.
Irving Penn transformed fashion photography with his work for Vogue in the '40s and '50s. He then began to both capture and create many of the icons of the 20th century: it's difficult to think of Picasso, Pacino, Capote, Dietrich, without one of his luminous portraits springing to mind.
Pablo Picasso, Cannes 1957
He was in complete control in the studio, ushering his subjects into a corner he'd made by slanting two backdrops together. Deprived of props and PR, hunched into a small grey space, the great personalities of the day revealed themselves in surprising ways to the camera. Limiting his subjects' movement relieved him, Penn said, "of part of the problem of holding on to them.”
His compositions were always simple; even his fashion shoots were famously unfussy. He didn't speak much to his subjects as he worked, unless it was to ask something that might jolt them into being themselves. Penn was never happier than when he left the bright, tight glitz of the cities and went to parts and people unknown. Places like Peru, Dahomey (now Benin), Morocco, and New Guinea.
In 1948, after a shoot for Vogue in Lima, he travelled to Cuzco, historic capital of the Inca Empire. Intrigued with the look of the local people, he decided to try to take some portraits. He then happened on the only photo studio in the town. Thrilled with its stone floor and perfect northern light, he convinced the owner to take some time off and let him rent it.
In the most affecting shot from those few days, Penn placed a boy and a girl in the room on each side of a wooden stool. The children are so tiny that the stool appears to be table-high. Diminutive figures with immense self-possession, they hold hands and stare out at Penn, at the unknown world that lives in that box and beyond it, with an innocence and dignity that could break your heart.
In the 1960s, he became smitten with platinum rather than silver printing, although the process demanded much more time and precision in the darkroom. It was worth it for the velvety blacks and glowing whites of the resulting image, nowhere more evident than in his series from Dahomey, where the dark skin of his subjects made for some of his most striking work.
In 1972, Penn went to the southwest desert area of Morocco to photograph the blue men of the Tuareg. However, they had no interest in his enterprise. He had more luck with the Guedra women in Guelmine, who “sat, eyes fixed on the lens, enjoying the camera’s scrutiny yet themselves impenetrable…"
In Worlds in a Room, published in 1974, Penn wrote about his journeys in prose as elegant as his photographs. In Morocco, although having met the first photographic subjects he couldn't control, he seems not to regret it at all: "What is revealed is no more than these mysterious creatures meant us to know."
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