Irving Penn
This is one of Penn's models for his famous work ! He is one of my favorite photographers. And that is because he captures the style of Fashion and Beauty especially to famous covers and magazines.
Penn was born in the town of New Jersey of 1917. At a young age, he became influenced by his Art teacher at the Art school that he attended. He had purchased his first camera and after he finished school, he moved to New York City to work as a graphic artist. Did you know that he also became an art director and a painter? Penn has been all over the place and until then, Vogue hired Penn and was fond of his work and they had published his work to their cover. Throughout his career, Penn has also done still lifes, covers, and portraits, but his best known was Fashion Photography. He was married to his model, Lisa Fonssagrives, and he had mostly used her to model for his best work. Penn had not only photographed for fashion and beauty, he also captured celebrities, fashion models, places of the world, and many more. He can engage to sit for hours just to look beyond his personality to the camera and it took time for him to reveal a true and satisfying picture.
300 of Penn's pictures were published to Moments Preserved of 1960 and to Inventive Paris Clothes of 1909-1939. There were collections of portraits and examples of fashion and still life. Penn went big. He was so famous that his artwork was put into the Art Institute of Chicago ! He became one of the first photographers that seperated magazine and fine art photography to narrow between art and fashion. While traveling around the world, every travel was a set of his assignments for cover or Vogue or for Look. Penn had featured for Voge for over 66 years ! He had photographed the styles of landscapes, food, and beautiful people. His photographs were exhibited from many gallieries and museums such as in New York City or in Washington, D.C.
After his wife, Lisa, died at age 80, Penn was left with his two children, Mia and Tom, who followed the footsteps of their parents and became designers. Nothing could stop him from continuing his work. He began to experiment with something new. Penn used the moving-light photography, he used the light combined with a long exposure time in order to achieve the results.
Irving Penn was a legacy and he became influenced by many photographers. He was the master of "controlling the image" as you could say and he was interested in the way the people he modeled, dressed and decorated themselves.
Months later, Penn had died at the age of 92 on October 7, 2009, but his legacy and his amazing work of art and photography stayed behind him. His work as of today, is still exhibited around the world and in The Irving Penn Foundation, they had donated 100 pictures to the Smithsonian Museum in D.C. and it then brought collections of Penn's work to an everlasting capture of a picture perfect moment.
"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 one word, effective." —Irving Penn.
