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Irving Penn

The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition | 2008 | Copyright

Irving Penn 1917-, American photographer, brother of Arthur Penn , b. Plainfield, N.J.; studied Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art (1934-38). Best known for his fashion work, he is also a master of portraiture and still life. Originally a painter, Penn began working working for Vogue magazine in 1943 and became one of America's most successful fashion photographers, known for his cool, refined, and glamorously stylized images. In portraiture, Penn uses plain backgrounds and natural light and is famously adept at capturing the essence of his sitter's personality. He has photographed many of the world's most famous people and also traveled worldwide to capture other human subjects. As beautifully composed as his figural work, Penn's still lifes form a kind of collective memento mori in their concentration on the ruined and the ephemeral—cigarette butts, fragments of objects, fruit pits, chewed gum, and the like. His work has been exhibited at New York's Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery, Washington, D.C., and at the Art Institute of Chicago, which owns his archives.

Bibliography: See his Moments Preserved (1960), Worlds in a Small Room (1974), Passage (1991), People in Passage (1992), and Irving Penn: A Career in Photography (1997); study by J. Szarkowski (1984).

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