Irving Penn: The Fashion Photographer Who Became an Artist

On the Promenade in Gstaad, where Swiss reserve meets discrete Alpine Modern lux, the silvery glow of Irving Penn's platinum prints are a picture of understated elegance. The photographs are visible from the snow-covered pavement, seen through the large storefront windows of Gagosian’s latest gallery outpost, a thousand metres above sea level in the Bernese Oberland, framed by the carved-wood chalet façade.

Among the 30-odd prints in this first collaboration between the mega-dealer and the Irving Penn Foundation is the photographer's unsurpassed portrait of Marlene Dietricht, shot in 1948 during a rare (and reportedly tense) encounter in which she momentarily let down her guard. There are numerous exemplars of Penn’s groundbreaking fashion work for Vogue shot during the peak early years of their 60-year collaboration, including a 1949 portrait of Lisa Fonssagrives posed in a two-cornered bicorne hat and veil to illustrate the new Mid-Century silhouette. In another photograph, made the following summer, the ‘world’s first supermodel’ is captured in a Balenciaga feathered dress. By the time it was printed, she went by the surname of Fonssagrives-Penn, having married the photographer in London in September 1950. 

Irving Penn, Marlene Dietrich (B), New York, 1948, gelatin silver print, 9 5/8 x 7 3/4 inches (24.3 x 19.5 cm), edition of 12 © The Irving Penn Foundation. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

Back home in New York a month after the wedding, Penn was invited to a symposium at the Museum of Modern Art to discuss the state of the medium alongside contemporary luminaries such as Walker Evans and Lisette Model. “The modern photographer does not think of photography as an art form, or of his photograph as an art object,” he said, declaring “the printed page, not the photographic print” as the ultimate end goal. 

A change of heart came in 1963 when, having grown increasingly dissatisfied with the waning quality of magazine reproduction and layouts, he had a revelation. “He went to visit George Eastman House [in Rochester in upstate New York] and saw a show of Pictorialist prints,” says Joshua Chuang, who occupies a unique position among the elite blue-chip galleries with his job title of director of photography. “It’s like the scales dropped from his eyes. And that spurred a new ethos, which was that the print was an end in itself. From that point on, his prime creative energies were towards [darkroom] experimentation.”

Penn was still busy shooting all sorts of commercial and editorial assignments, but he spent his spare time obsessively printing. “He kept the results of those experiments secret for many years,” says Chuang, who has curated the show at Gagosian’s gallery in Gstaad, which runs until 6 April. The market for fine art photography wasn’t established until a decade later, in the early 1970s, so Penn wasn’t making prints for sale. His new focus was, says Chuang, a more profound shift. “When Penn made that turn, that’s when I think he became an artist.”

Penn learnt and adapted the processes used by the Pictorialists during the Victorian era, favouring gum bichromate and platinum printing, almost single-handedly reviving the latter, prizing its tonal depth and textural qualities. “Central to this new ethos,” writes Chuang, “was his embrace of the negative as a generative source capable of yielding multiple meanings through prints that varied in texture, scale and tone, allowing him to reanimate and reinterpret key images from his oeuvre.”

Irving Penn, 2026 (installation view, Gagosian, Gstaad). Photo: Annik Wetter. Artwork, front and left walls: © The Irving Penn Foundation; back wall: Condé Nast. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

By way of illustration, Chuang has selected three examples of the same image for the Gstaad show. Penn’s 1951 photograph Seine Rowboat is presented as a high-key black-and-white reproduction as intended for Vogue, together with a green-tinted dye-transfer version he made for the cover of his 1960 book, Moments Preserved, emphasising an errant streak across the negative, alongside an impressionistic yellow-toned gum print made nearly a decade later.

Speaking to The Art Journal from Gstaad ahead of the opening, Chuang points out that Penn did, in fact, have his first commercial exhibition in New York in 1960 at Alexander Iolas, the pioneer art dealer who created the playbook for the global gallerist. But it wasn’t until the 1970s that he began to offer prints that were actually created as artworks, and that coincided with the booming new market for photography. “I think he saw an opportunity there,” says Chuang. “He was very strategic. He wasn’t represented by Light Gallery or Witkin Gallery [two of the first commercial spaces to specialise in photography]. It was by Marlborough, which was a big player in contemporary art then.”

The protocols and terminology for photographic prints sales were still being worked out during these early years. And while Penn was canny in the way he self-positioned himself in this new market, Richard Avedon, his friend and great rival, played a key role in establishing a blueprint for the editioning and sizing of prints. “When Avedon made his editions, every print was meant to be the same,” says Chuang, while Penn allowed his experimentation to dictate what he sold. “Especially with the alternative process works, he printed a negative until his aesthetic curiosities were satisfied in terms of its potential. So there’s a lot of variance in the prints within the same edition, all of which he documented. With Penn, you sometimes have very uneven edition sizes – two, five, 17, 53 – and that reflects the number of prints he thought were good enough [in] all the different variants that he felt represented the potential of that negative.”

Penn never lost that sense of curiosity, nor his wonder and exaltation of everyday people and objects, photographing discarded cigarette butts or flowers in decay alongside high couture and celebrity portraiture – and all given the same status when realised as extraordinary prints whose depth of tone defied their translation to the flat surface. Over the next three decades he travelled widely, making personal work on the back of assignments, always returning back to the purpose-built darkroom and laboratory he created in a barn at his home on Long Island in the mid-1960s. 

Institutional recognition coincided with commercial success. MoMA and The Metropolitan Museum of Art put on solo exhibitions in the 1970s, and in the following decades both staged retrospectives that toured the world. From 1988, he was represented by Pace Macgill, and to this day, 17 years after his death, Penn remains one of only a relatively small number of photographers whose work regularly commands six figures. Last October, a dye-transfer print, Ginkgo Leaves, New York, 1990, sold for $567,600 at Phillips, benefitting the foundation he set up 20 years earlier.

Irving Penn, Gerbera Daisy / Gerbera asteraceae, New York, 2006, pigmented inkjet print, 17 7/8 x 16 1/4 inches (45.4 x 41.1 cm), edition of 17 © Condé Nast. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian

The date of that work says a lot about Penn’s consistent mutability, producing some of his best work in his sixties and seventies, and shooting his 165th – and last – cover for Vogue in 2004. His genius was his visual wit, but also his dogged obsession to the photographic object. Back in the mid-1960s, Penn railed against the industrially manufactured uniformity of the conventional photographic print. He couldn’t buy platinum paper off the shelf, so he figured out how to do everything himself. “When you see [Penn’s platinum prints] in person, it’s the way the light gets absorbed by the surface, and they’re very tactile, much much more akin to the surface of a charcoal drawing,” says Chuang. “He took the hard path. And you see the results. He coated all the platinum prints himself. He invented this whole method of multiple exposures of internegatives on the same sheet of paper to build depth and tonal range…. some taking 50 man hours. 

“Each one was supposed to look different. You see that palpably when you look at his prints. They were made with curiosity. That’s what makes them special. His teacher was Alexey Brodovitch [the legendary art director], whose motto in the Design Laboratory was, ‘Surprise me.’ And that is the model that Penn himself adopted, not just with his compositions, but also with his objects.”