Irving Penn

Hamiltons Gallery represented Irving Penn and later his Foundation for over thirty years. The gallery still works closely with his pictures and has a number of works available from various collections. Irving Penn is one of the most important modern masters of photography. He has inspired future photographers of all genres with his portraits, still lifes and fashion pictures. He worked as a magazine photographer for Vogue and created numerous personal projects. His work forms significant parts of the world’s most renowned public and private photography collections.

Although he was best known for his fashion photography, Penn created more than one hundred still lifes over the course of his career. These images reflect his initial training as a painter as well as his studies with Brodovitch. His objects are often carefully laid out against a simple background, replicating his signature, minimalistic style, allowing the viewer to render their complete focus onto the subject.

 

Former curator of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, John Szarkowski once commented, “Penn has been one of photography’s conspicuous innovators and distinguished performers in at least two of the medium’s oldest and most successful genres: still life and portraiture.”
Penn’s still lifes are still some of the most coveted of his pictures, and a monograph of many of these images was published with a forward by Swarkowski in 2001 by Bullfinch Press.