Remembering Irving Penn

The legendary photographer died yesterday at the age of 92. The Daily Beast’s Philip Gefter recalls his genius. Plus, VIEW OUR GALLERY of Penn’s iconic images.

Here is a true story that characterizes the perfectionism of Irving Penn, who died yesterday at the age of 92: after being presented with 500 lemons from which to select the singular best of the bunch, he proceeded to take 500 photographs of that one lemon to arrive at l’image juste. The anecdote not only typifies the photographer’s dogged pursuit of the ideal, its symmetry might well be a metaphor for his uncompromising classicism.

Click Image To View Our Gallery of Irving Penn's Work

Penn’s reputation was secured in the middle of the 20th century primarily as a photographer for Vogue, where Alexander Liberman, the legendary editorial director of Condé Nast magazines, had hired him in 1943 as an art director. Within a year, however, Penn had published his first cover photograph for the magazine, and his career as a photographer was launched. He produced so much of his celebrated work over the course of twenty years at Vogue—both portraiture and fashion photography.

During his lifetime, Penn photographed so many prominent cultural figures of the 20th century that he came to be regarded as an equal among them. But his stature grew not just because of his venerated subjects—he advanced the genre of portraiture. His formal rigor, graphic daring, and studied simplicity brought the portrait to a new level of representation. The rich, mottled tones with which he crafted his portraits are less about creating mood than about rendering pure physicality. With bold, contrasting light, he cast his accomplished subjects in nothing less than monumental terms—as if each one is chiseled, for the ages, in stone.

His fashion work placed him at the top of that field because of his meticulously crafted, utterly soigné, optically titillating pictures. The model for many of Penn’s best-known fashion photographs was Lisa Fonssagrives, to whom he was married for 42 years, until her death in 1992. Regardless of the model, though, with nothing less than virtuoso skill he rendered the palpability of skin, the texture of fabric, the elegant line of a dress, as if enunciating every detail with breathtaking precision.

For years Penn produced impeccable negatives for pictures he sometimes did not see until they were printed in the pages of Vogue—printing over which he had no control. In the early 1960s, as the printing quality of commercial publications declined with the growing cost-consciousness of publishers, Penn’s dissatisfaction with the way his own published pictures were printed led him on a personal artistic exploration of the intricate and laborious platinum printing process. He went on to make one of a kind platinum prints of many of his Vogue images.

During the final years of his life, Penn had been actively securing his own legacy, methodically placing bodies of his work in several important museum collections. In 2002, he donated 85 one-of-a-kind platinum prints to the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the museum subsequently exhibited the work in a large show, "Irving Penn: Platinum Prints," in 2005. Last year, the Getty Museum in Los Angeles announced their acquisition of 250 Penn prints from his blue-collar series of portraits called "The Small Trades" and a show of the same name opened in September. The museum purchased 125 of the prints, and Penn donated the rest. The same arrangement was made that year with the Morgan Library in New York; Penn donated 35 portraits, and they purchased an additional 32 for their collection, for the museum's inaugural exhibition of photographs.

Many of the great writers, artists, and musicians of the last half-century compose Penn's visual pantheon of arts and letters: W.H. Auden, Francis Bacon, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, and Tennessee Williams, to name just a few. Penn was the natural heir to Cecil Beaton and Edward Steichen, both of whom photographed cultural figures central to the early half of the 20th century for Vanity Fair and other lavish publications of the day. But, while Beaton and Steichen shared an element of theatricality in their portraiture, constructing for their subjects a public persona out of ambient lighting, elegant clothing, and props—chaise lounges, grand pianos, bouquets of flowers, swank cigarette holders, Penn banished the accoutrements. He relied on manner, attitude, and countenance to represent a subject's legacy.