Penn, Irving, 1917–, American photographer, brother of Arthur Penn, Penn, Arthur Hiller, 1922–, American director, brother of Irving Penn , b. Philadelphia; studied Black Mountain College and the Actors' Studio, Los Angeles.
..... Click the link for more information. b. Plainfield, N.J.; studied Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art (1934–38). Best known for his fashion work, he is also a master of portraiture and still life. Originally a painter, Penn began working working for Vogue magazine in 1943 and became one of America's most successful fashion photographers, known for his cool, refined, and glamorously stylized images. In portraiture, Penn uses plain backgrounds and natural light and is famously adept at capturing the essence of his sitter's personality. He has photographed many of the world's most famous people and also traveled worldwide to capture other human subjects. As beautifully composed as his figural work, Penn's still lifes form a kind of collective memento mori in their concentration on the ruined and the ephemeral—cigarette butts, fragments of objects, fruit pits, chewed gum, and the like. His work has been exhibited at New York's Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery, Washington, D.C., and at the Art Institute of Chicago, which owns his archives.

Bibliography

See his Moments Preserved (1960), Worlds in a Small Room (1974), Passage (1991), People in Passage (1992), and Irving Penn: A Career in Photography (1997); study by J. Szarkowski (1984).

Penn, Irving

(born June 16, 1917, Plainfield, N.J., U.S.) U.S. photographer. He aspired to be a painter but at 26 took a job designing photographic covers for Vogue and soon was established as a fashion photographer. His austere fashion images communicated elegance and luxury through compositional refinement and clarity of line rather than through the use of elaborate props and backdrops. He branched out into portraiture after World War II and became much admired as a portraitist of celebrities. In his portraits the subject is usually posed before a bare backdrop and photographed in natural northern light. The resulting images combine simplicity and directness with great formal sophistication.