Wright Auction

Born in New Jersey in 1917, Irving Penn became recognized as one of the 20th century’s greatest photographers, helping to expand the understanding of the discipline beyond information and into the realm of fine art. Penn was one of Vogue’s top photographers for more than six decades, and he is celebrated for his body of work across fashion photography, portraiture, and still life.

Penn attended the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Arts from 1934 to 1938, where he studied with Russian immigrant Alexey Brodovitch in his Design Laboratory. After working as Brodovitch’s assistant at Harper’s Bazaar and taking various art directing stints, Penn was hired at Vogue in 1943, where he was tasked with prepping layouts and suggesting cover concepts to the magazine’s photographers. The publication’s art director, Alexander Liberman, observed Penn closely and, upon seeing recent contact sheets of Penn’s travel images, encouraged him to pursue photography. Penn went on to travel extensively for Vogue, and was given considerable creative freedom in terms of subject matter and style.

As Penn’s visual language developed, he drifted away from Vogue—some at the magazine felt his images were too severe—and towards advertising, where he was able to deepen his engagement with still life photography. As magazine budgets became tighter in the 1960s, the quality of printing declined, which led Penn to research earlier printing methods that would have more satisfying results. He thus pioneered his own process for platinum printing and created three major series specifically conceived for this method: Cigarettes, Street Material, and Archaeology.

Penn’s images showed, “the control of an art director fused with the process of an artist,” according to Merry A. Foresta, who co-organized the artist’s 1990 National Portrait Gallery retrospective. Noted for his minimalism and exacting sense of composition, Penn was also a master technician who applied his skills to an exciting variety of subject matter, from celebrities to shards of bone: “Probably most famous for photographing fashion models and cultural figures,” wrote Andy Grundberg, “[Penn] seemed equally at home photographing Peruvian peasants or bunion pads.”

Penn’s works are held in the permanent collections of institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Portrait Gallery, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. The Irving Penn Paper and Photographic Archives are held by the Art Institute of Chicago.