The Fashion of Irving Penn

“He could not tol­er­ate medi­oc­rity and was always striv­ing for excel­lence. But this was not a sac­ri­fice for him,” Pas­cal Hoël, the exhi­bi­tion cura­tor, tells me. “Through­out his career, he used a very min­i­mal­ist set­up that com­pelled him to focus on the per­son stand­ing before him, with­out arti­fice or acces­sories.” In 1954, Penn opened his own stu­dio on 80 West 40th Street, New York. The space boast­ed large win­dows, allow­ing him to utilise the nat­ur­al light while shoot­ing in the day­time. Dur­ing this time, his cam­era rota­tion expand­ed to include a Dear­dorff V8 and Has­sel­blad. Hoël con­tin­ues, “All that mat­tered was the qual­i­ty of his eye. He could spend a great deal of time work­ing on a com­po­si­tion until he achieved the result he want­ed.” Pen­n’s dis­ci­pline could also be pro­ject­ed onto his sit­ters, some­times result­ing in them endur­ing gru­elling process­es in order to achieve the ‘shot’. One image, Mas­cara Wars, cap­tured in 2001, illus­trates a model’s eye as she was made to tug at her lash­es with mas­cara wands for hours on end. The final result is a close-up of the model’s eye, veined and red from exer­tion, on the verge of tears.

Penn’s trun­cat­ed process of image mak­ing was a sort of purg­ing. His pre­ten­sions, if they can be called that, were direct­ed towards pre­serv­ing the dig­ni­ty of the black-and-white image. “Black-and-white pho­tog­ra­phy has dis­ap­peared from the pages of mag­a­zines, which now pre­dom­i­nant­ly pub­lish colour images,” Hoël reflects. This shift came from the desire to cap­ture images in a more accu­rate-to-life way as colourised capa­bil­i­ties became the norm in tele­vi­sion and print­ing, along­side low­ered costs for colour pro­cess­ing from the 1960s onwards. Unde­terred, Penn would main­tain his mono­chro­mat­ic slant to image-mak­ing. He even­tu­al­ly grew exas­per­at­ed by the lim­i­ta­tions of mag­a­zine repro­duc­tion and then turned to plat­inum-pal­la­di­um print­ing in his Long Island dark­room. The process gave his images a more nuanced range of high­lights, mid­tones and shad­ow, essen­tial­ly act­ing as colour when there was none.

Penn remained “faith­ful to a demand­ing artis­tic vision” through­out his career, seem­ing­ly unin­ter­est­ed in the vagaries of taste so long as he remained engrossed by style. From 1967 to 1971, he built a portable stu­dio for a series of roam­ing pho­to essays for Vogue. The endeav­our took him all over the globe, from Nepal to Cameroon and Moroc­co. One series called The Quest for Beau­ty in Dahomey (now the Repub­lic of Benin) sees Penn pho­to­graph locals in their tra­di­tion­al garb along­side images of reli­gious altars ded­i­cat­ed to the voodoo god Leg­ba. Despite the pre­vail­ing pho­tog­ra­phy move­ment in West Africa that demand­ed care­ful­ly staged sit­ters, Pen­n’s images reflect a more relaxed soci­ety, with women draped lan­guid­ly in group shots, neck­laces off-cen­tre and cool expres­sions that indi­cate rap­port. This peri­od also gives rise to some of Pen­n’s most mem­o­rable fash­ion pho­tographs, includ­ing Balen­ci­a­ga Ros­es Dress (1967), Mouche with Gold Neck Band (1960) and Nao­mi Sims in Scarf (1969). 

Sean Gro­gan writes for The New York Times that “the his­to­ry of fash­ion pho­tog­ra­phy can be divid­ed into before and after Irv­ing Penn.” Hoël makes a sim­i­lar argu­ment. Look­ing at the 1965 Trans­par­ent Rain­coat (Ver­usch­ka) and the 1987 Issey Miyake Sea­weed Dress, he empha­sis­es how Penn’s work often exceeds the con­fines of fash­ion pho­tog­ra­phy, sub­li­mat­ing the image into some­thing greater and more aspi­ra­tional. His col­lab­o­ra­tion with Issey Miyake, which began mid-career and spanned thir­ty years, exem­pli­fies this. After Miyake’s col­lec­tions debuted, a proxy for Penn would receive Miyake’s clothes and bring them back to New York for Penn to pho­to­graph in his New York stu­dio. Miyake would relin­quish any con­trol over the final image to Penn—the two were aes­thet­ic para­mours, bond­ed through a shared fas­ci­na­tion with pure form. Miyake’s design lan­guage of pleat­ing, move­ment and vol­ume appealed to Penn’s sen­si­bil­i­ties. 

Draw­ing on Miyake’s involve­ment with bal­let and the­atre, Penn pho­tographs his alien, play­ful gar­ments against white back­drops. Miyake’s splashy designs are coun­ter­in­tu­itive to Penn’s typ­i­cal work: posed, dynam­ic, but odd. The result­ing pic­tures are humor­ous, ask­ing us to make sense of the geo­met­ri­cal rid­dles, swollen backs and stair­case-sil­hou­ette pants that com­prise the sea­son­al col­lec­tion. Seen togeth­er, they rad­i­calise the body, show­ing us how a garment’s two-dimen­sion­al form can be pushed to the fur­thest degree. 

In the lat­er years of his career, Penn began exper­i­ment­ing with dif­fer­ent motifs for his com­mis­sions by Phillis Pos­nick for Vogue. These includ­ed masks in Beau­ty Treat­ment with Gauze Mask (1997) and Foot­ball Face (2002), where Penn used the obscured or dis­tort­ed face to com­ment on the neg­a­tive impacts of beau­ty treat­ments on women. “Pen­n’s pho­tographs offer a view of the evo­lu­tion of the fash­ion world over the 65 years dur­ing which he pho­tographed it,” Hoël adds as we look at the pic­tures, hung in salon style. 

Scat­tered through­out the exhi­bi­tion are more por­traits of indus­try leg­ends: a slight­ly bewil­dered Picas­so peers over a pulled-up sweat­shirt akin to, in Pen­n’s words, “a high-school bas­ket­ball coach”. Yves Saint Lau­rent scru­ti­nis­es us with a sin­gle eye, the rest of his face hid­den behind his hand. An insou­ciant Elsa Schi­a­par­el­li leans against a cor­ner, hand on hip. Often work­ing late into the night, Penn sought to devel­op a keen knowl­edge of the light­ing, the fram­ing and the sub­ject. Some sit­ters, like Picas­so, want to hide, while oth­ers enjoy being seen. We learn how he charges at his ele­ments and how they defend in turn.

Penn’s images are gripped by two horns. He demon­strates his immu­ni­ty from visu­al trends and his pow­er of inim­itabil­i­ty. The pic­tures on dis­play demon­strate when time itself was less of a com­mod­i­ty and could be poured almost end­less­ly into plan­ning a com­po­si­tion (it was not­ed that some­times Penn sketched out his plans months in advance.) The process is one of inti­ma­cy before the fact. 

Penn’s indi­vid­u­al­ist approach gave him total con­trol over the final image, imbu­ing them with a grav­i­tas that ele­vat­ed them beyond fash­ion pho­tog­ra­phy and into some­thing clos­er to art. Like Hoël affirms, “The excep­tion­al qual­i­ty of Penn’s pho­tographs, with their strong graph­ic sen­si­bil­i­ty and his remark­able mas­tery, invites us to look at them as we would the paint­ings of the great­est mas­ters.” Mas­tery, in this instance, is a com­mand over time through image. Work that con­tin­ues speak­ing to us, even from the oth­er side.