A few days ago my old friend and mentor Jim Egan paid one of his trademark surprise visits to my studio. We discussed among other things the passing of Irving Penn, and I learned again how small the photography world is, and that Jim had taken classes with a photographer who had studied under Penn decades earlier. This new found connection lead me to think of my own photography training, and helped me to synthesize some of the thoughts about Penn’s career that had been developing since his death a few weeks ago.
Penn once famously said “photographing a cake can be art” and I’m sure that he meant if fully. It’s important to note that the art world that he was emerging into was not at all friendly to photographers, not really unlike today, but the forces acting on the photographer, and the photography market were different.
Two separate comments from instructors I had in photography school years ago changed the direction of my career. The first, “you and you alone are responsible for everything that exists in that frame,” and the second, “what you subtract from the image is more important than what you add.” Sounds simple enough, but really those two comments are antithetical to most of the common wisdom in the world about photography, and Irving Penn must have realized that.
His style was certainly minimalist, some might say stark. He brought a sense of calm to a world and a medium often dominated by chaos. To this day a large segment of the population, including those in the art world denegrate photography as being too populist, too simplistic, too easy. These people falsely believe that the process of photography involves pointing a camera and pressing a button. Those of us who practice this art professionally know that that is only a stage in the overall photographic process, and not even the first, the last, or the most important stage.
Irving Penn is widely credited with popularizing a style that included more subtraction than addition. Simply look at any photograph taken before about 1945, and compare it to an Irving Penn, or Penn inspired photograph. The first thing you’ll notice is that the pre 1945 shots look very much like a snapshot taken today. Something that was pointed, and shot. Look at an Irving Penn photograph and you will see the results of a man who spent decades studying and practicing his craft, and then in the presence of some of the most famous and influential figures of his time (and a few cakes), turned that craft into art.
Irving Penn subtracted what was unnecessary from his photos, to allow us to focus on what was most important. He forced us to look at the world through his eyes. The fact that he was the first major photographer to do this is even more impressive, and we are all better off for it.
