Irving Penn

I do wish my brain worked a bit better - I wrote down Irving Penn because somewhere or someone I read said, look at Irving Penn for group portraiture as the shapes he made were good to study. Sadly for the person who wrote this I cannot remember who or where it was.  If I do I will certainly come back here and correct that as I feel a bad for not being able to include a link; I think a photographer I've been looking at.   And I shall definitely try in future to be more fastidious about writing everything down.  Anyway, this is a short entry as I have not looked at much yet but wanted to get something recorded on my blog especially in relation to group portraits.

Anyway, Irving Penn, born in 1917 - died in 2009 at the age of 92, is another photographer who trained under and worked for Alexey Brodovitch just like Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Lillian Bassman, Paul Himmel and so many others I've been looking at recently - he's such a huge influence and seems like a really important father figure to all these people.  Penn started as an artist and some of his drawings were published at Harpers Bazaar.  I guess this background and training in graphic design is what makes the shapes of his group photography so useful to study.

Penn worked for Vogue from the early 40s onwards and was prolific in advertising, working for a variety of fashion houses and other industries too.  There is also, travel, ethnographic work, still life, and of course portraits, and especially of models and famous faces.

Penn published and exhibited his own work and I'm particularly interested in Earthy Bodies (which I've deliberately not looked at before writing this).  I understand this work was not exhibited until the 80s despite being produced in the late 40s.  I have found the whole concept of 'nudes' really difficult to contemplate and in fact even find the very word pretty uncomfortable.

I love the high contrast and stark style of his portraits  - and was fascinated to learn that he was one of the first photographers to use very simple grey or white backgrounds.  Is this true?  Wikipedia is known sometimes to get things wrong.

Info taken from Wikipedia
Google search for images
Some examples:
Bikers, Children, Dancers, Hippie Bikers