PENN, IRVING

born June 16, 1917, Plainfield, N.J., U.S. American photographer noted for his incisive portraits and sophisticated pictures for fashion magazines. Penn was the brother of the motion-picture director Arthur Penn. His early ambition was to be a painter, but at the age of 26 he took a job designing photographic covers for the fashion magazine Vogue. He began photographing his own ideas for covers and soon established himself as a fashion photographer. His austere images communicated elegance and luxury through compositional refinement and clarity of line rather than through the use of elaborate props and backdrops. Penn branched out into portraiture after World War II and became an influential practitioner of that genre. He photographed a large number of celebrities, sparring for hours with each sitter to reveal his personality to the camera. His portraits, with the subject usually posed before a bare backdrop and photographed in natural northern light, combine simplicity and directness with great formal sophistication. A memorable series of portraits he did in 195051 and collectively called Small Trades was of labourers formally posed in their work clothes and holding the tools of their trade. Three hundred of Penn's pictures were published in Moments Preserved (1960). His other books include Worlds in a Small Room (1974), a collection of portraits of people he encountered in remote foreign locales, and Passage (1991), a retrospective survey of more than 400 examples of his work in portraiture, fashion, ethnic studies, and still life. Penn's platinum prints of female nudes and of cigarette butts are characterized by the same tonal subtlety, compositional virtuosity, and serenity that mark his other pictures.