Irving Penn
Irving Penn
Irving Penn was an American photographer known for his fashion photography, portraits, and still lifes. Penn's career included work at Vogue magazine, and independent advertising work for clients including Issey Miyake and Clinique. His work has been exhibited internationally and continues to inform the art of photography...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhotographer
Date of Birth16 June 1917
CityPlainfield, NJ
CountryUnited States of America
I have always stood in awe of the camera. I recognize it for the instrument it is, part Stradivarius, part scalpel.
The severe portrait that is not the greatest joy in the world to the subject may be enormously interesting to the reader.
I am a professional photographer because it is the best way I know to earn the money I require to take care of my wife and children.
I always thought we were selling dreams, not clothes
I've tried a few times to depart from what I know I can do, and I've failed. I've tried to work outside the studio, but it introduces too many variables that I can't control. I'm really quite narrow, you know.
Liberman said to me, 'I must cut back on the work you do for Vogue. The editors don't like it. They say the photographs burn on the page . After some years, I began to understand that what they wanted of me was simply a nice, sweet, clean-looking image of a lovely young woman.
A beautiful print is a thing in itself, not just a halfway house on the way to the page.
Over the years I must have spent thousands of hours silently brushing on the liquid coatings, preparing each sheet in anticipation of reaching the perfect print.
Sometime in 1964 I realized that I was a victim of a printmaking obsession, a condition that persists today.
What I really try to do is photograph people at rest, in a state of serenity.
I feed on art more than I ever do on photographs. I can admire photography, but I wouldn't go to it out of hunger.
Many photographers feel their client is the subject. My client is a woman in Kansas who reads Vogue. I'm trying to intrigue, stimulate, feed her. My responsibility is to the reader. The severe portrait that is not the greatest joy in the world to the subject may be enormously interesting to the reader.
I share with many people the feeling that there is a sweetness and constancy to light that falls into a studio from the north sky that sets it beyond any other illumination. It is a light of such penetrating clarity that even a simple object lying by chance in such a light takes on an inner glow, almost a voluptuousness.
The printed page seems to have come to something of a dead end for all of us.