Irving Penn was one of the twentieth century's great photographers, known for his arresting images and masterful printmaking. Although he was celebrated as one of Vogue magazine's top photographers for more than sixty years, Penn was an intensely private man who avoided the limelight and pursued his work with quiet and relentless dedication. At a time when photography was primarily understood as a means of communication, he approached it with an artist's eye and expanded the creative potential of the medium, both in his professional and personal work.

Learn more about the artist.

Irving Penn’s photographic work can be divided between gelatin silver prints, platinum-palladium prints, and color prints of various types. Some images exist in all three, as is the case with Still Life with Food.

As a young man, after graduating from the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art in 1938, Irving Penn harbored dreams of becoming a painter. In 1941–42, he spent a year in Mexico painting, but he found his results to be disappointing and destroyed all but a small group of drawings. Despite this repudiation, drawing continued to play an important role for Penn in his subsequent work as a photographer as he worked out an image and its composition.

Following his retrospective exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1984, Penn returned to painting after more than forty years. He developed unique working methods, inspired by his experiences printing photographs in platinum and palladium metals. 

After 2000, when Penn ceased platinum-palladium printing, he began making inkjet prints from digitally scanned drawings. He also produced freehand paintings using no photographic or printing processes.

To complement the essays in the Irving Penn: Paintings catalogue, we have combed through the foundation’s archive to unearth details about specific works featured in the publication.