I first became aware of Irving Penn when I spent a year living in Peru. His work of the Quechua indigenous group that he had taken 40 years earlier was something that had fascinated me and was one reason why I traveled there. Penn had created simple, but powerful images that captured the quiet strength of a largely overlooked people.
Some of those images were reproduced in “Centennial,” a photo book published a couple of years ago by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. The book includes chapter in the book written by Jeff Rosenheim that explained the significance of the Quechua images and the story of how they came about. As a former resident of Lima, I loved these images and was always curious about how Penn was able to produce images of a people who generally don’t want their photographs taken.
Over the course of a few days, he took two thousand photographs with the help of one or more assistants and two translators: one for Spanish and a second for Quechua. The images established a template for ethnographic portraits he would later make around the world, Rosenheim writes.
The book opens with a general overview of his life and a description of his training as an artist and the influence of his mentors. What follows is an overview of the work he did over a 60-year career. His subjects included fashion, still lifes, nudes and a wide variety of portraits of tradesman, fashion models, artists, writers and designers.
Other chapters in the book describe setbacks in his career as an artist. In the late 1940s, he started a series of nudes that were not immediately accepted at Vogue or the fine art world. The images are relatively tame by today’s standards, but were considered too risque at the time. But Penn obviously believed in their value, as he kept them in his portfolio.
He worked most of his career at Vogue, but was never fully comfortable with the world of high fashion of his day. He found a wide variety of other subjects that captured his attention. My key takeaway from the book: Penn’s most significant work was produced for personal projects, although it certainly helped that he had the support of editors who knew his strength and weaknesses and gave him wide latitude to pursue his personal interests.