After much determined negotiation, London’s National Portrait Gallery has managed to secure over one hundred of Irving Penn’s portraits from the closely guarded Penn archive and other collections around the world. Simply presented, these luminous, silvery black-and-white prints make for an unsurpassed body of portraiture which celebrate Penn’s astounding career.

The exhibit introduces us to Penn in 1944, randomly embracing the surrealist Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico on the street in Rome. “To me he was the heroic de Chirico; to him I was a total stranger, probably demented,” said Penn. What followed in the mid-1940s were portraits of numerous painters, sculptors and photographers.

In 1943 Alexander Liberman, then Art Director of Vogue, invited Penn to join the staff in devising ideas for the cover of the magazine. By 1947 he was photographing Vogue’s regular section People Are Talking About. This lead to an extraordinary roster of subjects for Penn, a veritable “who’s who” of art, film, fashion and literature at the time.

Visitors see Salvador Dalí’s sinister, bulging eyes appearing to almost pierce the photograph. In her portrait, Edith Piaf’s head tilts back as though about the launch into her evocatively smoky singing voice. Charles James poses with dress makers’ scissors, lying on the floor beside a mannequin swathed in a half finished, duchess satin gown. Truman Capote, in an oversized coat, seems almost contorted, perching on a chair, gazing knowingly into Penn’s lens.

Penn’s portrait composition made him an iconoclast to contemporary photographers. Abandoning grand and fanciful scenery, he embraced austere and stark settings. Cigarette butts and scraps of string littered the floor of his studios. For his portrait, Alfred Hitchcock sat upon cardboard boxes covered with scrap carpet. Penn sandwiched some subjects (among them Elsa Schiaparelli and the Duchess of Windsor) into tight corners. He didn’t stand for anyone who objected. “One sitter said, ‘You’re going to have to clean that up.’ He went home unphotographed,” Penn once recounted.

As his mastery of portraiture progressed, he began to hone in on his subjects, framing their upper torso and face rather than full figure. This allowed him to focus on the beguiling expressions which he was so adept at extracting from his sitters. This focus was at its height in the 1950s when Penn travelled to Paris.

In typical Penn style, he found a discarded theater curtain and used is as a backdrop. It was during this period that he took his arresting portraits of Picasso, a young Yves Saint Laurent, Colette, Audrey Hepburn and the famed fashion photographs of his wife, Lisa Fonssagrives.

The excitement that comes from viewing Penn’s work all at once lies in the element of surprise that comes from each portrait; no two expressions or compositions are the same. Penn disliked calling his days work “a shoot,” preferring to refer to each as a separate “love affair.” Perhaps in this he intended to romanticize the tacit battle between photographer and sitter over the intended outcome of the portrait. Though the directors, playwrights, actors and actresses and fashion designers changed, what remained was Penn’s command of the genre of portraiture.

The simplicity and unassuming nature of this exhibit seems wholly appropriate. After all, how could a body of photographic work that begins with Cecil Beaton with Nude in 1946 and ends with Julian Schnabel in New York in 2007, do anything other than speak for itself?

Above image: Alfred Hitchcock, New York, 1947, by Irving Penn. Image courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery

“A good photograph is one that communicates a fact, touches the heart and leaves the viewer a changed person for having seen it. It is, in a word, effective.””- Irving Penn

Penn’s uncanny ability to make simplicity mesmerizing while glamorizing the “everyday,” transcended fashion photography into the realm of art. He revealed the importance of capturing life and emotion, using his trademark stark backgrounds and natural lighting rather than contrived props—his minimalist technique inherently ushering in a new era for commercial photography. With a career spanning more than half a century, Penn captivated admirers with evocative photographs of celebrities, Hell’s Angels, fashion models, still lives, the torsos voluptuous female nudes and places that seemed so distant to the mid-century American eye—New Guinea, Dahomey, Nepal and Cuzco. As one of the fathers of modern postwar fashion photography and portraiture, he is revered for his visual clarity, uncomplicated direction, use of light, attention to detail and an ability to give praise to commonly overlooked subjects.

Born on June 1, 1917 in Plainfield, New Jersey, Penn sought a career as a painter. He attended the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia where he studied painting, drawing, and graphic design. Mentored by his teacher Alexey Brodovitch, Art Director for Harper’s Bazaar, Penn began working as an unpaid assistant at the magazine during his summer vacations. Settling in New York after graduating in 1938, he freelanced as a designer before becoming Brodovitch’s assistant in the advertising department at Saks Fifth Avenue in 1940. Still wanting to be a painter, Penn left for Mexico and devoted a year to the artistry, returning in 1943 to the start of what would become a lifelong partnership with Vogue.

His Vogue career began at the age of 26 as an assistant art director —reporting to Art Director Alexander Liberman. Penn’s main responsibility was to supervise the design of Vogue’s covers. When staff members did not show interest in his designs, he began shooting them himself. On October 1, 1943, Vogue printed a cover featuring a still life – a brown leather bag and belt, scarf, gloves, an image of oranges and lemons, a jeweled ring and a note pinned to the wall – his first published work for the magazine. Still lives were not the usual realm for Vogue covers, but they were indicative of Penn’s training as a painter. He left to serve in World War II for a little less than year, returning to Vogue in1945 as a staff photographer. Always taking Vogue into new directions—the April 1950 cover of model Jean Patchett was the first black and white cover shot in years. His final cover for Vogue, May 2004, featured an elegant photograph of Nicole Kidman that revived his signature sense of timelessness and austere elegance. During his career, Penn shot more than 150 Vogue covers.

A man who preferred his own anonymity, Penn photographed some of the greatest talents of the time. He isolated his subjects by positioning them against an unadorned backdrop or in tight corners. His celebrity portraits included Miles Davis, James van deer Zee, John Osborne, S. J. Perelman, Jean Cocteau, Barnett Newman, Alberto Giacometti and Pablo Picasso. Penn treated his subjects as equals rather than placing their fame on a pedestal, ultimately exposing the life behind the achievement. In 1947, while shooting “The Twelve Most Photographed Models of the Period,” he met Lisa Fonssagrives, the Swedish ballerina turned model who is frequently considered the world’s first supermodel. They married in 1950 and remained together until her passing in 1992. Penn’s continued penchant for still lives produced such subjects as cigarette butts and tattered abandoned clothing as well as recognition in the New York gallery scene. After traveling the globe photographing indigenous people, he published a series of pictures in 1950-1951 featuring tradesmen and women in New York City, Paris and London that are now on view as part of Irving Penn: Small Trades at The Getty Center in Los Angeles until January 10, 2010. Penn opened his studio in 1953 where he continued his unique approach to photography.

His calculated perfectionism comes through in all of his work. Ahead of his times, Penn broke rules and challenged the industry’s ideas about beauty, fame and glamour. Through his lens, he brought life to the unfamiliar, gave grace to banal subjects and made the garment the focus without accentuating the unnecessary. It was his unquestionable talent that makes Penn’s work fundamental in shaping the history of fashion photography.