Irving Penn

Irving Penn photographed cigarette butts with the same care he gave to Picasso, and shot for Vogue for sixty-six years. He studied under Alexey Brodovitch in Philadelphia, worked as his assistant at Harper's Bazaar, spent a year painting in Mexico and destroyed the results, and joined Vogue in 1943 as a layout artist - the first cover he shot was because no photographer would execute his design. His method was subtraction: a plain grey or white backdrop, north light, no gadgetry. For one series he built a narrow corner from two studio flats and pushed sitters into it, which produced portraits of Duchamp, Dali, Stravinsky and Colette that are as much about being cornered as about the face. He photographed tradespeople in London, Paris and New York in their working clothes with their tools, in the manner of nineteenth-century street portraiture, and later travelled to Peru, Dahomey, New Guinea and Morocco with a portable daylight studio. He revived platinum printing, which is laborious and permanent, and used it for still lifes of cigarette ends and street debris that dealers could not sell. He married the model Lisa Fonssagrives and worked until he was ninety-one. He photographed the same twelve small-time Paris tradespeople in a studio he set up in an empty attic with a single skylight. His Vogue still lifes of food helped invent the modern food photograph. He and Fonssagrives were married for forty-two years until her death. He printed his own platinum work in a barn in Long Island.

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