Irving Penn: Centennial

Published to mark the hundredth anniversary of Irving Penn's birth, this catalog accompanied the Metropolitan Museum of Art's 2017 retrospective of his career. It gathers one of the largest selections of his photographs ever assembled in one volume.

Organized by curators Maria Morris Hambourg and Jeff L. Rosenheim, the book moves through Penn's major bodies of work in turn: early documentary studies, existential portraits, fashion photography made for Vogue, the 1948 Cuzco pictures, the female nudes of 1949-50, the Small Trades portraits of tradespeople, ethnographic photographs made in Dahomey and New Guinea, and the cigarette still lifes. Essays by the curators and contributing scholars accompany close to three hundred plates, many drawn from a group of prints promised to the Met by the Irving Penn Foundation.

Penn (1917-2009) worked across fashion, portraiture, and still life for nearly seven decades. He developed a spare studio aesthetic built on plain backdrops and close control of composition and light. The Met began acquiring his photographs in 1959 and had staged two earlier monographic shows before this one. The centennial retrospective drew on a 2014 acquisition of platinum prints from the Small Trades series and surveyed the full range of his work for the first time.