Penn, who began as a fashion photographer, crossed the chasm that separated commercial and art photography. His works are considered icons. Irving Penn, a grand master of American fashion photography whose "less is more" aesthetic combined with a startling sensuality defined a visual style that he applied to designer dresses or fleshy nudes, famous artists or tribal chiefs, cigarette butts or cosmetics jars, many of them now-famous photographs owned by leading art museums, has died. He was 92.
Penn died today at his apartment in New York City, said his brother, film director Arthur Penn. The cause was not given.
Penn started contributing to Vogue magazine in 1943 and became one of the first commercial photographers to cross the chasm that separated commercial and art photography until the 1970s.
He did so in part by using the same technique no matter what he photographed -- isolating his subject, allowing for scarcely a prop and building a work of graphic perfection through his printing process.
Critics considered the results to be icons, not just images, each one greater than the person or the object in the frame.
"In Penn's photographs, generations of brilliant artists and lovely young women are endowed with dignity for their enduring moment," wrote fashion critic Kennedy Fraser in a 2007 Vogue tribute to Penn when he was 90.
He was a purist who mistrusted perfect beauty, which brought an engaging tension to his fashion photographs as well as his still lifes and portraits. One of his best-known shots for Vogue in the 1950s shows an impeccably dressed model glancing sideways through the veil that covers her face, as if she wasn't ready for her close-up.
In another famous shot, this one from the 1990s, bright red lips drip with gooey chocolate. Suddenly the dessert world's favorite food looks very unappealing.
Penn's most familiar photographs are the cosmetics ads he shot for Clinique that have appeared in magazines since 1968. Each image is a balancing act of face cream jars, astringent bottles and bars of soap that threatens to collapse. He photographed them at close range to suggest the monumental scale of Pop art soup cans, doughnuts and baseball bats.
From the time he began his career, his personal interests took him far from the fashion industry. He traveled widely, photographing Peruvians in native dress, veiled Moroccan women, the Mud men of New Guinea. A notorious perfectionist, he carried his own portable studio to the ends of the earth. Many of his personal photographs are collected in his books that are luxurious objects in their own right.
Despite an obvious appreciation for the art and craft of a beautifully made dress, Penn strained against the unreachable world it represents. To escape it, or contest it perhaps, in the late 1960s he started photographing crushed cigarette butts and street debris. A change in subject matter only proved how well suited he was to couture fashion's labor-intensive detailing and attention to style.
He shot butts the way he often photographed designer dresses, fairly close up, with a graphic precision, against a white background. He then built his negatives into "platinum-palladium" prints, a meticulous and costly process that involves repeated printings of a negative on the same piece of paper to create an extraordinary depth and richness.
"Beautiful and boring," wrote New Yorker magazine's Janet Malcolm in a review of an exhibit of the butts at the Museum of Modern Art in 1975.
"What might appear to be eroded stone columns or neolithic implements or diseases of the bone . . . are in fact photographs of cigarette and cigar butts."
Other reviewers found Penn's cigarette butts pretentious when they were displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in 1975. Many questioned whether anything by a fashion photographer belonged in an art museum. A similar debate stewed during an exhibit of Penn's photos of urban debris at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1977.
Far-sighted reviewers, however, praised Penn's ability to turn discarded objects into art. "Each distinct, dirty, torn and ragged reject has been carefully selected, isolated, enlarged and transmuted from a cultural throwaway into a haunting iconic artifact," an Art News review concluded in 1977.
Visitors to his Fifth Avenue studio in New York City compared it to a hospital operating room. It was a place of white walls, gray accessories, hugely expensive equipment and a group of assistants quietly scrambling to help carry out the day's procedures.
Penn's Spartan office became a matter of record in 1997 when he donated his archives to the Art Institute of Chicago. His gift included decades of invitations to exhibition openings, written requests for interviews which he rarely granted, press releases about his work and a career's worth of contact sheets and business correspondence, all arranged by date.
An elegant man of average height with a voice so soft that ordinary noise from the work studio next to his office could make it impossible to hear him, Penn's minimalist tastes extended to his personal dress. For years he wore blue jeans, khaki work shirts and sneakers, to art openings, dinner parties and fashion shoots.
"He considered himself a workman," said photography historian Diana Edkins, a former curator of photography for Conde Nast Publications, including Vogue, now with Aperture Press. "His uniform was his way of saying, 'I may be king of fashion photography but I'm not going to play that game.' "
Source latimes.com
No comments:
Post a Comment