Irving Penn: A Career As A Photographer

Irving Penn didn’t grow up wanting to be a photographer, he actually wanted to be an art director, but after spending a year in Mexico painting and knowing he wouldn’t be anything better than mediocre. He returned to New York, winning the attention of an art director’s at Vogue, who then hired him as his assistant, to suggest photographic front covers. The staff didn’t partially like Penn’s ideas, but the art director who hired him did and arranged for him to simply do it himself. The director seemed to like it so much, that he published it in the October issue of Vogue as the front cover. And. with doing so, it launched his career as a photographer.
Throughout his career of almost seventy years, he became one of the most well-known American
photographers of the twentieth century and was deemed a master of both black-and-white and color photography of many seen and un-seen photographs.
His more iconic fashion, portrait, and still life, imagines could be seen in the pages of Vogue. During, the 1960s and 70s, his revival of platinum printing shaped a large change in the art world to this day.
In the 1950s his images were the definition of divine, and his ability to turn left behind objects into an unexpected beauty. He even was the first photographer to cross a magazine and a piece of fine art photography, into the art and fashion world combined. Aside from being a professional photographer of multiple genres, he was also an author of over eight books on his photography alone and two of his drawings into books. In all of his photography followed only one technique; by scarcely a prop and singling out his subject. Working a graphic perfect into his printing process, as well. Irving died at the age of 92 of unknown causes, and ended his mastery of defined visual style.