Irving Penn
Artist
Biography
Irving Penn (1917–2009) was an American photographer celebrated for his portraits, fashion photography and still lifes. Born in Plainfield, New Jersey, he studied design under Alexey Brodovitch at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art and joined Vogue in 1943, beginning a collaboration with the magazine that lasted more than six decades and produced over 150 covers. Working with spare studio backdrops and natural north light, he photographed artists, writers and cultural figures – famously posed in a narrow corner in the late 1940s – as well as tradespeople in his Small Trades series, people encountered on his travels, and meticulously composed still lifes. A master printer, he revived the platinum-palladium process in the 1960s and 1970s. His work was the subject of major retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1984), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2017).