Irving Penn’s first photographic studio in New York during the 1940s lacked natural light. Located in a windowless office building on Lexington Avenue, the photographer had to recreate the natural light that inspired him using electricity. Throughout his decade in that space, Penn yearned for a specific light, one that “falls in a studio from the northern sky.” As he described it in his 1980 book ‘Worlds In a Small Room,’ it was a light “of such penetrating clarity that even a simple object casually placed under it acquires an inner glow.”
Penn, of course, would eventually find that light. First, in 1954, thanks to a new studio in an early 20th-century building overlooking the southwest corner of Bryant Park, featuring high windows known in the industry as “the hospital” for its white walls, silence, and order. Then, in remote parts of the world where Penn traveled to photograph their inhabitants, such as the Lasithi Plateau, a two-hour drive east of the capital of Crete, or on the shores of Lake Chad in Cameroon, the land of the Kirdi aboriginal settlements.
However, the limitations of the Lexington studio shaped Penn’s approach to photography, even when he didn’t have to rely on artificial lighting. By the time that elusive light found its way into his life, he had already learned to imbue his subjects – whether Marlene Dietrich or a raw steak – with the inner glow he sought.
“I knew that I was beyond my powers and abilities to get a convincingly simulated daylight result, so I came to enjoy and feel safe in the artificial circumstances of the studio,” explained the photographer in the book. “I even came to develop a taste for the somewhat artificial images. I had accepted for myself a stylization that seemed to me more valid than a simulated naturalism.”
Penn never lost that yearning, but he always found a way to infuse his images with a disarming sincerity, a special weight. His photography always existed in that balance, an alchemy of the sensitivity and perfectionism of a frustrated painter – Penn spent a year trying to find himself as an artist in Mexico, after which he washed all the linen canvases he had painted because they didn’t meet his expectations and used them as tablecloths – the elegance of a gentleman raised, as his friend, journalist Owen Edwards, defined him, “in a time when men wore hats and ties and women wore gloves and dresses, and good manners were not optional”; and the prudence and humility of a professional who had to learn on the fly surrounded by the greatest geniuses in his field.
In one way or another, Irving Penn’s influence has been present in every fashion publication on sale for the past six decades, but a collection of his images stands out from them all for having changed what the world expected when opening a magazine. Taken in Paris in 1950, they were considered so modern that of the six international issues of Vogue in which they were published, only one dared to use one of his photos for the cover. His elegance was considered, first, radical and, over time, essential. But for the industry to find the future in Penn’s voice, the photographer had to find his voice first. And he did so month after month in the pages of Vogue.
October 1943: New Ways to Wear New Accessories
Despite being a prolific photographer, Irving Penn had to be practically coerced into taking photographs many times throughout his career by Alexander Liberman, Art Director of Vogue and Condé Nast between 1943 and 1994. Liberman hired Penn as a personal assistant in 1943, shortly after he returned from his year in Mexico. He installed him in a cubicle next to his office and instructed him to familiarize himself with the magazine, which at the time was being run with aplomb by Edna Woolman Chase. Penn introduced himself to the staff photographers – Horst, Blumenfeld, Beaton, Lynes, and Rawlings – and the socialites who worked at the magazine as editors under Chase’s conservative mandate, which required them to always wear hats and white gloves to the office, and never open-toed shoes.
But familiarizing himself with Vogue didn’t take long, so one day Penn went into his boss’s office to basically ask what he was supposed to be doing. Liberman thought for a second and suggested he think about ideas for covers, so Penn started visiting the offices of the magazine’s photographers with his drawings in hand, to no great success, as they were all “too busy.” When he shared his failure with Liberman, the latter suggested he take the photograph himself. Irving said no. Liberman insisted, and Penn reluctantly agreed. The result, in October 1943, was the first still life on the cover in Vogue’s history. Wrapped in solemn austerity, a purse, a glove, a belt, a scarf, and a huge yellow diamond stared back at surprised Vogue readers at the newsstands.
Edna Woolman Chase, however, was the most surprised of all: “Alex, if you’re going to do something as radical as a still life cover, why not hire the best still life photographer?” Liberman knew why, but he couldn’t explain it to Chase. “There was a quality about Penn’s photography, the clarity of vision and the absence of extraneous details, that made it fearlessly modern,” he explained in his biography ‘Alex: The Life of Alexander Liberman’.
The next step in his plan: getting Penn to apply that modernity to fashion.
February 1949: Flying to Lima
Penn, of course, refused. Driving ambulances in Italy during the war, the photographer one day saw artist Giorgio de Chirico on the streets of Rome with a shopping bag. He stopped to ask if he could photograph him, he agreed and thus opened the door to a career as a portrait artist in which Penn felt much more comfortable than with fashion, which he believed he didn’t know enough about to photograph. But Liberman, as always, insisted. And Penn, as always, agreed.
The photographer, model Jean Patchett, nearly 30 kilos of clothes, and a Rolleiflex camera with four hundred rolls of film were sent to Lima in December 1948 for the first of a few editorials that Irving Penn would do outside of a studio. In Peru, Penn drove Patchett crazy, who appeared every morning perfectly dressed and made up to see the photographer spend nine hours straight preparing sets that never convinced him in the end. After several days, they hadn’t taken a single photo. And Patchett had had enough.
“I was frustrated and depressed, so we went into a cafeteria,” the model recalled in Liberman’s biography. “I sat down and said to hell with it all, so I started playing with my pearls and, because my feet hurt, I took my shoes off. Suddenly I heard Penn shout, ‘Hold still!’” That snapshot would eventually become one of the most reproduced of Penn’s life and one of the keys to Vogue’s future.
While Chase wanted to communicate elegance in a very proper, strict, and elitist sense, a rigid and superlative femininity, Liberman sought that fine crack in the perfection of the façade where style is born. That’s where he wanted to take Vogue and where Penn would take his best photos. But before looking for it in Paris, he first looked for it in the capital of the ancient Inca empire.
December 1949: Christmas in Cuzco
When the entire Vogue team returned to New York for Christmas, Penn decided to stay a while longer. And together with an assistant, he flew to Cuzco, a vertical city over three thousand meters high in the heart of the Andes. There he looked for a local photographer and found the fantastic Martín Chambi. He paid him for a vacation so that he could use his studio, and got to work.
Over the next few days, Cuzco celebrated the Santurantikuy Christmas fair, in which Quechua Peruvians descend on the city in a confluence of Andean culture “to buy toys and sweets, and sell eggs, fruit, or cloth,” as the photographer would explain in a text in Vogue. And Penn, amidst the explosion of culture, photographed all those visitors who wanted to enter the studio.
These images, part of the permanent collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, indelibly marked the photographer’s career. Not only for being the first of his ‘Worlds in a Small Room’ series, which he would resume a decade later for each Christmas issue of Vogue, but because they represent what made Penn a genius. Leaving behind the bustle and colors of the fair, Penn observes his subjects, firmly placed in front of a worn painted backdrop, with the same austerity with which he observed a glove in the 1943 still life.
Penn wanted to photograph the people of the Andes, but he wasn’t Henri Cartier-Bresson. He wasn’t a photojournalist. And he didn’t act as one. The willingness to isolate the Quechua people from their circumstances makes something special emerge from their gazes, the color of their mantles, the pride of their gesture. They acquire a regal character, although, as Penn recalled, they all trembled when they posed. It may seem like a report far removed from the one he did with Jean Patchett just a few days earlier, but Penn finds the same essence of style in both. Both photos convey not an interest in presenting clothes, but in transmitting how their models wear them. And he achieves that the elegance of the image never gets in the way of the genuineness of the Quechua people. That’s why it’s so impactful.
The snapshots took a year to be published in the magazine, but Liberman knew the photographer was ready. In 1949, he told Penn to buy a tuxedo. He was traveling to see the Haute Couture of Paris.
September 1950: The Collections of Paris
That first excursion was, as Liberman told Penn, to “learn which forks to use.” He wanted the photographer to become familiar with the Parisian air and the traditions of couture without the camera involved. And in August 1950, he finally asked him to go photograph the collections for that year’s September issue. Liberman found Penn the light he was looking for, “soft and defining,” in a studio on the fifth floor of an old photography school on the rue de Vaugirard. Practically against the clock, clothes from the collections of the best designers in the French capital (from Balenciaga to Fath) went up and down the five flights of stairs of the studio after having been brought there at high speed on bicycles dodging Paris traffic. But if the chaos surrounded the creation of the images, nothing transpired to the pages of Vogue.
In front of an old 19th-century theater curtain “painted with the alternately opaque and luminous platinum of the Parisian winter sky, at once neutral and atmospheric, with a touch of depth and movement,” as Vince Aletti defined it in his book Issues, the models posed one by one in front of Penn’s lens. The result was images of a breathtaking stoic beauty: haute couture, completely naked, against a gray backdrop. “The best of the previous work – by Meyer, Steichen, Beaton, Hoynigen-Huene – seems theatrical in comparison, images in which the dress and its model play a role,” John Szarkowski, director of Photography at the MoMA between 1962 and 1991, reflected in the catalog of the retrospective organized by the museum in 1984. “Penn’s images of 1950 make no reference to a plot or its circumstances, they suggest no old chateaux, no perfect picnics, no flirtations in Edwardian salons, no dream worlds of Freudian avant-garde. They are not stories. They are simply images.”
If the industry up to that point had sought to portray fashion in a context that responded to the idea a magazine had of elegance, here the purity of Haute Couture was shown in its greatest splendor. Penn claimed it was because of his ignorance of what good taste meant – downplaying himself, he admitted to Szarkowski that he wouldn’t have known what kind of chandelier or wallpaper to choose, that gray was the only solution that occurred to him – but the shadow of Cuzco’s influence is too long.
Through this purity, Penn translates into images the spirit of the artists behind the creations, and in no case is it as palpable as in the images of Cristóbal Balenciaga’s pieces.
Irving Penn and Balenciaga
Balenciaga always had a complicated relationship with the media. As Ana Balda, professor of History and Fashion Press at the University of Navarra, doctor in Communication and expert in the couturier, tells us, Balenciaga would withdraw from the official Haute Couture calendar in 1956 to protect himself from copies, postponing his fashion shows for a month: as the years went by, the press would need Balenciaga more than Balenciaga would need the press. But even six years earlier, the Spanish creator already looked at them with suspicion. So much so that Penn himself, in his 1991 visual autobiography, ‘Passage’, recalls how “with the enthusiasm of the moment, even Balenciaga agreed to have his designs photographed in our studio with models of our choice.” Something that, in fact, was not very common – Balenciaga used to send magazines what he considered should be photographed, not the other way around. But the couturier believed in Penn.
“Balenciaga had grown up in the 1920s, and he liked what was published in Vogue at the time: Edward Steichen, who, despite using props, put a lot of emphasis on attention to clothing,” explains Balda. “For itself, Penn was already a much calmer photographer than Avedon, who introduced much more spectacle into his images. For him, clothing was just another element in the composition. But with a worn curtain in the background, what Penn achieved was to exalt the design much more.”
The photograph of Balenciaga’s melon sleeve, which opens the report of the Paris collections, is the best example of this. “A photo for history,” Balda emphasizes. “Fundamentally, what Penn conveys with that image is design and quality, the idea that that wool is in a different league. You can see the warp and weft of the fabric with the technique that was used in 1950. In the end, Penn never stopped doing still lifes. He left the object bare. And I don’t know anyone who has refined the image more.”
Burning the Page
“In 1952,” Penn explained in a 1991 interview for the New York Times, “Liberman told me, ‘I have to cut back on the work you do for Vogue. The editors don’t like it. They say the photographs burn the page.’ A few years later, I began to understand that what they wanted from me was simply a pretty, sweet, and clear image of a charming young woman. I started to do that, and that’s when they saw me as valuable and I went on to have 200 or 300 pages a year. Until then, I had tried to make a photo. Then I started to try to make a product. That’s what I’ve been doing in fashion photography ever since.”
This, of course, is a lie. Penn would contribute to the pages of Vogue some of the best images the magazine has ever published: whether they were photos of models, flowers, aboriginal tribes, or frozen food. Even when Diana Vreeland and Richard Avedon rebuilt Vogue in their image and likeness with the certainty of a steamroller in 1966, Penn never ceased to be the standard in fashion photography. And his images, despite what Penn may say, didn’t change that much either.
Over the following decades, the photographer continued to portray models such as Veruschka, Lisa Taylor, or Linda Evangelista with the same solemnity as Lisa Fonssagrives in 1950. Penn never got rid of the worn curtain from Paris. The rest of the world simply understood that this background from the past was actually the future.
