Fashion Icon Irving Penn, 92

 

NEW YORK, NY (October 7, 2009) – Irving Penn, one of the world's most famous fashion and personality photographers, died at his home in Manhattan this morning, according to his representative Peter MacGill. Penn was 92.

Known for his distinct style and the impact he had on black-and-white fashion photography, his style has been mimicked by generations of fashion and portrait photographers.

Named one of the world's greatest photographers in 1958 by Popular Photography magazine, Penn's photographs appeared on the covers and pages of Vogue magazine as well as on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Addison Gallery of American Art.

After training as an art director and interning at Harper's Bazaar and Junior League magazines, and at Saks Fifth Avenue department store, he left for Mexico and a year of painting. Abandoning painting, he returned to New York and was hired by Vogue as an assistant to the art director with the task of suggesting possible Vogue covers. When photographers didn't like Penn's ideas, but the art director did, Penn was asked to try to shoot the concepts himself. And so his first photograph of a leather bag and scarves, used on the October 1, 1943 cover, launched his iconic photographic career.

Early in his career Penn liked to use a technique he called his "corner" method, placing two backgrounds together to form a corner in which he placed his subjects, virtually trapping them in the space between the corner and his camera. Penn said that it made some of his subjects feel secure, and some others feel trapped, but either way it made his subjects "become immediately available" to his camera.

Penn's archives and a collection of his personal items were donated to the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago. The Small Trades – a collection of 252 full-length portraits taken by Penn from 1950-1951 in London, Paris, and New York – was published as a book and it was also an exhibit that opened last month at the J. Paul Getty Museum. Penn's exhibit The Small Trades is scheduled to run through January.

 

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