The Photographs That Defined Irving Penn’s Style
Photograph by Irving Penn.Marlene Dietrich, New York, 1948.
Everything that’s great about Penn is here in this stark portrait. Dietrich’s black-clad shoulders, arm, and back compose such a strong, even blunt, shape—her torso could be a Calder stabile, or maybe a detail from a Miro tapestry. Her face is almost secondary, but what a face: one of the movies’ most iconic, and yet here it looks haunted, or even hunted. You notice, too, that her body is oddly twisted; it looks like an extremely uncomfortable pose. Did Penn catch her this way (doubt it), or did he talk this powerful woman into contorting herself just so?
Photographs by Irving Penn.After-Dinner Games, New York, 1947. Cigarette No. 37, New York, 1972.
A magazine assignment produced the exquisite composition on the left, which seems to be a riff on Cubist collage. Penn sends that sinuous chess piece into compositional war with the rigid geometry of the card backs and the pair of die, two fives, balanced on top of the glass. But notice, too, the way he dirties up the image with a burned match, ashes, and a wine or coffee stain on the tabletop. In a catalog essay, Rosenheim quotes Penn telling students, “A still life is a representation of people. . . . Each still life object has got to tell as much of a human story as if you looked right into a human being’s eyes.” The photo on the right is from a personal series Penn did of cigarette butts he collected from the sidewalks and gutters of New York. Here he discovers beauty, or at least something fascinating to look at, in the most mundane objects he could find. Perhaps there is humanity, too, in what humans cast off.
Photograph by Irving Penn.Dior Dress, New York, 1949.
If I may employ a highly technical bit of semiotic jargon here: just wow. The dress and the pose speak for themselves. The bonus is the way model Dorion Leigh’s torso and arms—and those sleeves!—lead your eye to her face. Her expression, simultaneously haughty and come-on-ish, is a just-right punch line. So is the curl of smoke that hazes an otherwise crystalline image.
Photograph by Irving Penn.Nude No. 72, New York, 1949-50.
Penn’s nudes build on Edward Weston’s work—more abstract than his predecessor’s but also more flowingly sensual. As Hambourg writes in one of the catalog essays, “Although [Penn] began with the svelte women who modeled fashion, he soon discovered that larger women made better pictures. The contours of volumes of fleshy breasts, bellies, and hips turning softly through space in a slow-motion sculptural ballet gave up picture after picture unlike any seen before.”
Photographs by Irving Penn.Tribesman with Nose Disc, New Guinea, 1970. Ingmar Bergman, Stockholm, 1964.
Penn’s portraits of Africans and New Guineans risk condescension. He is clearly drawn to their adornment, shooting them almost as if they were objets d’art, but then again he was a fashion photographer; European models get that treatment too. The man on the left’s white, perfectly circular nose ring and his breast plate make for a wonderfully graphic composition, but his eyes, engaging Penn and us, betray a distinct personality. They’re as vivid as Dietrich’s, the gaze as searching. Six years earlier, Penn shot one of the world’s most celebrated movie directors with his eyes held shut—an amusingly perverse choice for any filmmaker but especially so for one who wrote and directed some of the most penetrating, soul-baring psychodramas ever made. Bergman wears his own culturally resonant jewelry: a wedding ring. (At the time, he was on his fourth marriage, out of an ultimate five.)
Photograph by Irving Penn.Mouth (for L’Oréal), New York, 1986.
An advertising assignment. Like Penn’s still lifes of beauty products for Vogue, this image startles viewers by playing up the thick, wet, unguent sensuality of the makeup itself. The model’s lips are almost secondary, as if the picture were saying, it’s not that lip gloss makes you sexy; it’s that lip gloss itself is sexy. Penn’s genius here is that he found a way to make color samples sexy, witty, and maybe even a little bit disturbing.
