Trying to summarize Irving Penn in a short bio is, for me, like trying to paint a picture of a galaxy. We all have artists or thinkers who shaped us when we were young, whose work we consciously or unconsciously use as a measuring stick for the rest of our lives. For me, one of these artists is Penn. I’m at a loss for words.
But there’s a story about a different artist I’ll tell to illustrate something essential about Penn.
There's an anecdote about Anton Chekhov in which his friend asks him to define his writing method. Chekhov laughed, picked up an ashtray, and told the friend that he’d write a short story about an ashtray and give it to him the next morning. According to legend, he did just that. The internet says that this story highlights Chekhov's ability to find inspiration in everyday objects; this is putting it mildly. Chekhov’s creative capacities were such that he could spin an entire galaxy, cast of characters, narrative tension, sophisticated structure, etc., based on a single object he picked up at random.
If Chekhov were a photographer, I’m pretty sure he would have been Irving Penn. In fact, maybe Penn is Chekhov reincarnated! Because anything Penn shot was also instantly turned into an extraordinary, and beautiful, vision of reality, no matter its origin. My choice of anecdote about Chekhov is fitting actually, because one of my favorite series Penn shot is literally of cigarette butts. Gross, decaying, cigarette butts that he collected off the street in New York City, starting in the 1970s. The most beautiful one he shot, in 1999, is a color image of a pile of them. They’re utterly disgusting, the pinnacle of revulsion—-and yet it is one of the most perfect photographs I have ever seen.
-Eugenie Dalland