Irving Penn, the most artistic of fashion photographers

A CoruñaPablo Picasso was a tough nut to crack for some photographers. Although the American Irving Penn (1917-2009) was already highly recognized, Picasso did everything possible to prevent him from taking a portrait, even though his portrait is one of the Malaga-born artist's most iconic. It is also one of the stars of the major retrospective that the Marta Ortega Pérez Foundation is dedicating to Penn at its space in the port of A Coruña, with some 170 photographs. Picasso had arranged to meet Penn at his summer home, La Californie. But when the photographer and his assistant arrived and rang the doorbell, no one answered. Penn didn't give up and asked the assistant to jump over the fence to see if he could see the artist. And so he did, but Picasso wasn't foolish either, telling Penn he only gave him ten minutes and covering himself with a sweater as if it were a cape.

However, Penn ultimately won: Picasso began to get bored while he was preparing the photo, and failed to notice how Penn represented all his character and strength by concentrating on his left eye. "Irving Penn was above all an artist who transformed fashion photography," says the exhibition's curator, Jeff L. Rosenheim. The exhibition, organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York to mark Penn's centenary, will remain open until May 1, and A Coruña is the last city to host it. "Penn went far beyond fashion photography and was able to see the emotions of the people he portrayed, whether a supermodel or a chimney sweep. He was an expert at turning the everyday into the extraordinary," the curator emphasizes. "Penn was an excellent image maker, and this exhibition also confirms that he takes development to the highest level."

Over 60 years working for 'Vogue' magazine

Irving Penn is considered one of the great photographers of the 20th century, for his sobriety and elegance, and for his ability to express so much with so little. Nicole Kidman recalls that posing for Penn made her feel "extremely safe," that Penn was very quiet, and that he seemed to "wait" more than seek something. And if he had any goal in mind, it seemed to her to capture "an idea or a feeling." With this sensibility, Penn portrayed dozens of essential politicians, artists, filmmakers, writers, artists, musicians and performers of the 20th century, including Audrey Hepburn, Louis Armstrong, Federico Fellini, Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Salvador Dalí, Al Pacino, Yves Saint Laurent Hadid, Pavarotti, David Bowie, Le Corbusier, Milan Kundera, Groucho Marx, Grace Jones, Tàpies, Robert De Niro, Pavarotti, Balthus, Jorge Luis Borges, Nureyev, Elton John, Truman Capote, Duke Ellington, Umberto Eco, Alfred Hitchcock, Vladim and Martin Scorsese. His images could be seen in the magazine Vogue, for which Penn worked almost exclusively for 66 years: "As early as 1943, his editors recognized that Penn had sublime image-making skills and that he could imagine the page his photographs would appear on better than any other camera-working artist of his generation," he explains.

Another icon he photographed in an unusual way was Marlene Dietrich: she began the session by giving him orders, but he immortalized her with a rather intimate pose, a very different image. Penn is known for his meticulousness—perhaps inherited from his father, a Russian watchmaker who emigrated to the United States—and for his eagerness to work with natural light and in the studio. Curiously, his first studies were not in photography, but in graphic design, and he bought his first camera, a Rolley, with money he earned working as a window dresser at the Sachs department store one summer.

"Line, silhouette and balance"

Penn's career took a turn when VogueIn addition to still lifes, Penn commissioned him to photograph the subjects he was interviewing. To ensure he was in control, he placed them in a narrow corner he created in the studio. "Other photographers created luxurious environments for photographs. Penn simplified the experience with a simple white background to focus the viewer's attention on the pose, lighting, and natural style of the subject, whoever it was," says Rosenheim, who notes that what connects still lifes and portraits is "line, line, line, line, line."

Penn made for Vogue 165 covers, but it went beyond glamour. In 1948, he photographed the Quechua people in Cuzco, on one of his first ten major trips. Later, he was assigned to Paris to take more fashion photography. It was then that he met his second wife, the Swedish model Lisa Fonssagrives, whose death he mourned in 1999 by creating still lifes of wilting flowers. In the 1960s and 1970s, he echoed the social changes taking place and photographed groups, including hippies, the Hell's Angels, and indigenous people of New Guinea.

In the final section of the exhibition, you can once again see Penn's impact on fashion photography: Issey Miyake was so impressed by how Penn captured one of his 1983 collections that he commissioned him to do it until 1999.