PHOTO:Irving Penn-Photographism

Irving Penn was one of the most important and influential photographers of the 20th Century. In a career that spanned almost 70years, Irving Penn worked on professional and art projects across multiple genres. He was a master printer of both black-and-white and color photography and published more than 9 books of his photographs and 2 of his drawings during his lifetime.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Pace Gallery Archive

The exhibition “Irving Penn: Photographism” brings together approximately 30 photographs, epitomizing Penn’s groundbreaking photographic style.  Spanning from 1939 to the early 2000s, the featured works are accompanied by rarely seen archival materials and preparatory sketches, which articulate the artist’s notion of “photographism”. The exhibition proposes that Penn coined this neologism to underscore his photography’s arresting clarity and reductivism, born out of his antihierarchical crosspollination of mediums. The exhibition traces through its six distinct groupings of works the various artistic mediums and movements that shaped Penn’s practice. Though trained as a painter, Penn began working in the 1940s as a photographer for high-fashion magazines, notably Vogue, one of the few sites where experimental photography could be exhibited at the time. By integrating the printed page but also distinguishing itself from this busy ground, Penn’s work radically modernized various genres of photos, from still life and portraiture to editorial fashion photography. His unique stylistic approach or photographism consisted in a formal distillation that drew from the fine arts, such as drawing, painting, and sculpture, and the more commercial graphic arts, such as typography and graphic design. Early works included in the exhibition, such as “The Tarot Reader (Jean Patchett & Bridget Tichenor)” (1949) and “Fish Made of Fish” (1939), for example, point to the primacy of drawing in Penn’s compositional choices and formal effects. Other works, such as “Two Miyake Warriors (B)” (1998) and “Issey Miyake Staircase Dress” (1994), reveal the importance of architecture as well as choreographed art forms in Penn’s sustained collaboration with fashion designer Issey Miyake. Even the medium of photography itself is considered in Penn’s self-reflexive works, such as “Bedside Lamp” (2006) and “Girl Behind Bottle (Jean Patchett)” (1949). Eschewing chronology and the photographic series as organizing principles, the exhibition breaks with conventional modes of exhibiting photography in order to emphasize the different mediums and art movements that inspired Penn’s work throughout his seven-decade career. In its juxtapositions of disparate works, the show echoes Penn’s own intermixing of his art as seen in his annotated sketches on photographism. The presentation is accompanied by a slideshow highlighting the breadth of Penn’s work, from posters and Vogue spreads to tear sheets and ad campaigns.

Photo: Left: Irving Penn, Mouth (for L’Oreal), New York, 1986, dye transfer print, 18-1/4″ × 18-5/8″ (46.4 cm × 47.3 cm). image; 22-3/4″ × 19-1/2″ (57.8 cm × 49.5 cm), paper, Edition of 28), © The Irving Penn Foundation, Courtesy Pace Gallery. Right: Irving Penn, Bedside Lamp, New York, 2006, pigment print mounted to board, 28-7/8″ × 23″ (73.3 cm × 58.4 cm), image; 31-5/8″ × 23-7/8″ (80.3 cm × 60.6 cm), paper and mount, Edition of 17, © The Irving Penn Foundation, Courtesy Pace Gallery

Info: Pace Gallery, 540 West 25th Street, New York, Duration: 8/1-13/2/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00 (Schedule Your Visit), www.pacegallery.com