My dad is a photographer. A great one at that. His gift for the artistic portrait will always be vivid in memory. Grey and silver monochromatic tones captured the beauty in the most simple or complex of subjects and provided me with endless hours of exploration for finding the “art” within the subject.
Irving Penn my father’s favorite photographer made a deep impression on my family. His gifted talent to capture moments on film will always be remembered. Oddly, I still keep thinking about Irving Penn who died this October 7, 2009 at the age of 92. His works preserved. Tradesmen, culture and fashion history immortalized.
As Adam Gopnik, so eloquently wrote in his Postscript for New Yorker Magazine:
There are many instinctive romantics among popular artists, the Gershwins and the Chaplins who, through force of spirit and originality of style, take by storm the balcony and the boxes alike. Penn was something rarer, an instinctive popular classicist, with a magical gift for visual rhythm, for making something insignificant–a pattern of cigarettes and ashes, each ash miraculously in its one best place–look as formally inevitable as an eighteenth-century still-life.
Few photos of some of his early work the “tradesmen” portrait collection
Additional classic favorites of mine
Self Portrait
Mr. Penn, thank you for opening my eyes to the beauty of photography and the art of capturing the simple with complexity. Your images engrained in my memory and heart. You will be forever missed.
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It is interesting how Penn photographed some of the most famous fashion pictures ever published and yet had an eye to capture the heart and soul of the everyday working man and women in very dramatic poses in black & white photo’s. People like Penn are so rare to have and eye to capture the beauty in both worlds like no one else….