28 Facts About Irving Penn

Irving Penn was an American photographer known for his fashion photography, portraits, and still lifes.

Irving Penn's work has been exhibited internationally and continues to inform the art of photography.

Irving Penn was born to a Russian Jewish family on June 16,1917, in Plainfield, New Jersey, to Harry Irving Penn and Sonia Greenberg.

Irving Penn's younger brother, Arthur Irving Penn, was born in 1922 and would go on to become a film director and producer.

Irving Penn attended Abraham Lincoln High School where he studied graphic design with Leon Friend.

Irving Penn attended the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art from 1934 to 1938, where he studied drawing, painting, graphics, and industrial arts under Alexey Brodovitch.

Irving Penn worked as a freelance designer for three years, taking his first amateur photographs before assuming Brodovitch's position as the art director at Saks Fifth Avenue in 1940.

Irving Penn remained at Saks Fifth Avenue for a year before leaving to spend a year painting and taking photographs in Mexico and across the US.

When Irving Penn returned to New York, Alexander Liberman offered him a position as an associate in Vogue magazine's Art Department.

Irving Penn worked on layout for the magazine before Liberman asked him to try photography.

Irving Penn drove an ambulance in support of the British Eighth Army as it alternately waited out weather and slogged its way north through a miserable winter in the Italian Apennines.

Irving Penn photographed the soldiers, medical operations, and camp life for the AFS, and various subjects while bivouacked in India.

Irving Penn sailed back to New York in November 1945.

Irving Penn continued to work at Vogue throughout his career, photographing covers, portraits, still lifes, fashion, and photographic essays.

Irving Penn met Swedish fashion model Lisa Fonssagrives at a photo shoot in 1947.

Irving Penn died aged 92 on October 7,2009 at his home in Manhattan.

Best known for his fashion photography, Irving Penn's repertoire included portraits of creative greats; ethnographic photographs from around the world; Modernist still-life works of food, bones, bottles, metal, and found objects; and photographic travel essays.

Irving Penn was among the earliest photographers to pose subjects against grey or white backdrop and he effectively used its simplicity.

Irving Penn had spent his career up to that point making photographs that were seen almost exclusively in reproduction within the glossy pages of magazines and in his pivotal 1960 book Moments Preserved.

Irving Penn set himself the challenge of producing photographic prints that would surpass the technical limitations of reprographic media and deliver a deeper visual experience.

The platinum process requires direct contact with the negative, without enlargement, so Irving Penn first needed to create flawless negatives the same size as the desired print.

Irving Penn solved the problem of aligning and re-aligning the negative and the print surface over multiple exposures by borrowing a technique from the graphic arts: he mounted his paper on a sheet of aluminum with a series of registration guides along the top edge.

Irving Penn was guarded about the preparation of his emulsions and his precise formulations varied considerably.

Irving Penn frequently introduced palladium and iron salts into his coatings to achieve desired effects.

Irving Penn's photographs are composed with a great attention to detail, which continues into his craft of developing and making prints of his photographs.

Irving Penn experimented with many printing techniques, including prints made on aluminum sheets coated with a platinum emulsion rendering the image with a warmth that untoned silver prints lacked.

Irving Penn continued to capture collections by his favorite designers, such as John Galliano for Dior, Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel, and Christian Lacroix, for Vogue, incorporating these darker themes into his images.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum possesses a large collection of Irving Penn's works, including a silver gelatin print of Irving Penn's The Tarot Reader, a photograph from 1949 of Jean Patchett and surrealist painter Bridget Tichenor.