Analysis Of Irving Penn's Scissors Shop

In 1939, WW2 had just begun, and the migration of European artists to America had begun, creating an artistic environment open to Surrealist influence . Surrealism gained immense popularity in America, though not in the traditional European sense. The American interpretation of Surrealism resulted in works that were viscerally unconscious; and photography proved to be the only medium that fully encompassed the American Surrealist aesthetic . It was in this year, 1939, that Penn produced Scissors Shop, New York (1939) (fig.1). Scissors Shop would not be printed until 2001 and even after its physical creation; the silver gelatin print of this photograph would never be his most famous image. Irving Penn will forever be the giant of studio still
The use of light, in tandem with Penn’s framing within Scissors Shop, dismantles the continuities of space into zones, allowing for the sign dangling above the sidewalk to now hang in its own atmosphere, with no associations to the world below it, simply a sign with assumed relation to a store below. . The shadows generated by the sun at this hour of the day do not have the anxious quality that is implied by night street photography– day shadows are apathetic given their known position in relation to the direction of the sun. The shadows cast by city architecture in Scissors Shop suggest protective, proprietary shade over the shop sign. The instantaneousness of Scissors Shop as a photograph acts as the ‘magic’ of image in a street photographic sense, the instant in this case is the convergence of angles, spaces, lines, planes, figures, objects; the coincidence of different temporalities and different speeds of perishability within the image. Granted, there is nothing truly perishable within Scissors Shop, though it is more the idea of the perishability of the content, in this specific location, with this specific light and this specific
While in college at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Arts, Penn encountered Alexey Bradovitch, the Russian artist, graphic designer and art director while earning a degree in advertising design. Bradovtich became an immense figure in Penn’s academic and professional career, academically introducing him to a contemporary mix of Bahaus, International Style, School of Paris Modernism, and Surrealism. Penn’s academic education focused on art and commerce as well as Bradovitch’s emphasis on artistic independence and individuality. While in school Penn interned under Bradovitch at Harper’s Bazaar as a graphic designer, and after graduating in 1938 and purchasing his first camera, Penn became Bradovitch’s fulltime assistant at the publication and worked in Bradovitch’s avant-garde space. The page layout of Bazaar under Bradovitch’s art direction used liberal white space to highlight the artistic power of the images. This professional graphic design experience mixed with Penn’s flâneur’s aesthetic and developing photographic eye, it is no wonder that Scissors Shop is so graphically composed. The image has an almost advertorial quality to the composition, the negative space begs for text to give context to the unornamented shop