“We Don’t Shoot People; It’s Really a Love Affair”—Irving Penn’s Exhibition at the de Young Museum

Irving Penn, the iconic photographer is best known for producing an unprecedented 165 covers for Vogue across a span of 66 years at the magazine. His major retrospective exhibition opens at the de Young with 175 photographs ranging from the portraits of the famous personalities, to the humbled trade workers and village residents and visitors; from London, Paris, New York, to Cuzco in the Andes; from the couture cladded to the woolen dressed villagers and the nude; from fashion objects, decaying fruits, to cigarette butts. He created limited studio space, built neutral background, and controlled the interactions between the photographer and his subject to record revolutionary images.

Penn consistently utilized natural lights in his studios created across global travels for photography sites. He cornered the subjects between angled stage flat, built a grey wall as the neutral backdrop canvas and used natural lights striking from left or right of the subjects. He directed the interactions in a dynamic image making process while treated all his subjects equally with dignity and respect, regardless of their social economic status. Butchers, bakers, window washers, subway workers and street vendors were sitting subjects just as the luminary cultural elites and the glamorous fashion models. Images captured on negatives were later meticulously and miraculously interpreted through platinum-palladium or silver gelatin printing processes.

A section of the exhibition stands out which depicts the San Francisco countercultural movements with the famous portraits of rock bands the Grateful Dead and the Big Brother and the Holding Company, Hells Angels, and hippie families around the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood during Summer of Love. These mesmerizing Images were captured at a rented space on a second floor of a vast barn at Sausalito.

As a world traveler, Penn not only created vast number of glamorous images in the metropolitan cities of London, Paris and New York, but also across the globe in many other locations such as Papua New Guinea, Republic of Dahomey (now Benin), Cameron, Morocco, Peru and Nepal. He built custom tents as portable studios during his ten trips and created photographs in a series Worlds in a Small Room.

Other series that stand out including the groundbreaking photographs of the discarded single and group cigarette butts in 1972 that resonated with the upheaval from the sea of social changes in the late 60’s and early 70’s amid racial uprising, Vietnam War, and national crisis.

In the more recent decades up until the beginning of the 21 st century, Penn’s fashion and style portraits experienced emotional evolvement accompanying personal experience including his wife’s passing and his own aging. From lighter toned images depicting “youthquake” featuring model Marisa Bereson in bridal outfit to a childhood Yoyo Ma and write Joan Didion in her sixties, brilliant images reflect sentimental moods across his collection of time capsules.

During these decades, Penn continued his passion in still photography that portrays open ended stories. He not only created nine flower portfolios with tulips, peonies, poppies, roses and lilies, but also turned seemingly mundane objects such as bottle, vases, metal parts, rugs, even rotting fruits into artistic images that radiated creative tension and surreal energies.

So many images from this exhibition are instantly recognizable, Audrey Hepburn, Truman Capote, Hitchcock, Picasso, and generations of super models from the 1940’s to the end of the 20 th century.

Walking across the halls of the vast body of Penn’s work feels transcending time and space. However, something remains ever present and constant, the natural light reflected in his work across decades of collections, the penetrating observation of his vast individual subjects, and the precision of image capturing and miraculous printmaking that are the hallmarks of the revolutionary photographer. For Irving Penn, photography is truly a love affair of an unprecedent 70 years career.

Irving Penn, March 16 to July 21, 2024 at the de Young Museum, Herbst Exhibition Galleries