During a career that spanned seventy years, Irving Penn (1917–2009) established himself as one of the leading fashion photographers of the twentieth century, widely recognized for his work for Vogue magazine and his celebrity portraits. An innovator and perfectionist, he achieved a unique beauty in his work. Rock Groups exemplifies his distinctive aesthetic, technical expertise, and skillful compositional sensibility.
The artist studied at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art between 1934 and 1938, where he was a student of Alexey Brodovitch. His teacher, who had already begun his long career as art director at Harper’s Bazaar, (1934–1958), soon recognized Penn’s talents, publishing his first drawings in the magazine. Once he left school, Penn spent several years freelancing, taking over Brodovitch’s job as art director for Saks Fifth Avenue in 1940. He stayed only a year, embarking on a period of travel throughout the United States and Mexico, photographing and painting.
By 1943, Penn, back in New York, secured a position at Vogue magazine as an assistant to editorial director Alexander Liberman. At first he was assigned to layout and design, but, encouraged by Liberman, Penn transitioned to making photographs. Also in 1943, Penn shot the first of nearly 160 covers for Vogue, and would work for the magazine for the rest of his career.
Penn’s connection to the fashion industry was deeply personal. On a photo shoot in 1947, he met supermodel Lisa Fonssagrives (1911–1992), and they married in 1950. She would be the subject of some of his most striking images. His photographs of her and other models became icons of post-war glamour.
Penn opened his own studio in New York in 1956 to handle his extensive advertising commissions. He also was busy as a celebrity photographer, being one of the first to pose his subjects against a plain white or gray background in natural light. The imaginative poses of his stark black and white images in minimalist environments became his signature. Among the celebrities who posed for him were Georgia O’Keeffe, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, and Truman Capote. But he also made many images of people who were not well known, as in his series of ethnographic portraits in South America and Africa. For another series titled “Small Trades,” he photographed trades people in Paris, London, and New York. In addition to solo and group portraits, he also made skilled still life photographs. Whatever his subject, Penn’s compositions are founded in a strongly formal structure.
Penn had a knack for the directorial mode, and in the forties made a series of imaginative group portraits, among the most acclaimed is Ballet Theater Group, New York (1947). Others included gatherings of Vogue photographers, famous models, and cartoonists for The New Yorker.
In 1967, Look magazine sent him to the Bay Area to do a photo essay, and he was excited by the opportunity to leave New York and investigate what was happening on the West coast:
In 1967 there was word coming out of San Francisco of something stirring—new ways of living that were exotic even for California. People spoke of a new kind of young people called hippies, and of an area where they had begun to congregate called Haight-Ashbury. They seemed to have found a satisfying new life for themselves in leaving the society they were born to and making their own. There was talk of drugs, communal living, and group sex. There was a new kind of music and new musicians, and accompanying the music there was a new visual form, the light show…. It grew on me that I would like to look into the faces of these New San Francisco people through a camera in a daylight studio, against a simple background, away from their own daily circumstances.1
The artist engaged the music, motorcycle, and hippie culture he had heard about. One of the most striking photographs to come out of his trip was Rock Groups. Penn records Big Brother and the Holding Company, with their lead singer at the time, Janis Joplin, on the left, and the Grateful Dead on the right. Taken at the height of sixties San Francisco, it captures the spirit of rock and roll, drugs, and free love, and Penn was intrigued to be able document a subject so evocative of his own time. The plain background and the consistent focus on each individual gave power to his composition. His subjects were not what he anticipated: “During the actual photographing, the hippies and rock groups surprised me with their concentration. Their eyes remained riveted on the camera lens; I found them patient and gentle. There was not the distracted quality I might have expected in them”2
Penn also took several memorable images of the Hell’s Angels, who proved challenging to photograph: “They were like coiled springs ready to fly loose and make trouble. The delays and provocations they could produce were endless. Fortunately the hypnotizing lens of the camera and the confinement of the studio held them in check just long enough for the exposures to be made. When the experience was over and we heard their screaming bikes going down the road, I breathed a sigh of relief.”3
Part of the beauty of Penn’s images comes from the platinum palladium printing process he used. After years of experimenting with different processes, by the 1970s Penn came to prefer this one because of the warmth and depth it brought to the images. The combination of platinum, palladium, and iridium metals resulted in a handsome print that the artist
made by contact exposure from an enlarged negative on hand-coated paper. After the 1920s, only a few artists continued to use these emulsions because of the high cost of platinum and the amount of time it took to sensitize their own paper. Penn felt that the effort to work with it was worth it as the resulting prints were delicate, but full of descriptive information, expressing depth and emotion, qualities that were unfortunately lost when printed in magazines.
Elizabeth Unbehaun
Irving Penn, Rock Groups, (Big Brother and the Holding Company and the Grateful Dead), San Francisco, n/p 1967/1980, platinum print, 48.3 x 49.9 cm, SOLARI 91.010.001L