I was terrified of him—and that was a problem because I was the new editor of Vogue and he was the magazine’s most important photographer. I’m referring, of course, to Irving Penn, known only as Mr. Penn, and as formidable a figure as you could imagine when I took over at Vogue in 1988.
He was in his 70s, and already a giant of modernist photography—someone who approached a portrait sitting the way a Trappist monk approaches prayer. The photographs he produced out of his New York studio had uncanny power. He’d shoot an actor, writer, politician, or athlete, and his image held something up to view, a quality irreducible and pure.
I’m telling you about Mr. Penn because there is so much of him in Vogue Portraits, a new two-volume book coming out this month from Abrams. Vogue has published a small library’s worth of photography books over the decades, but never one quite like this.
Across 640 pages Vogue Portraits tells the story of the magazine’s features department, a side of Vogue that has always had its attention turned firmly outward to the wider world, to politics and sports and Hollywood and theater and fine art. Here are some six decades of history as it happened: heads of state and tennis players and poets and dancers and movie stars shot by artists like Annie Leibovitz, Steven Meisel, Horst P. Horst, Peter Lindbergh, Cecil Beaton, Tyler Mitchell—there are simply too many to name.
Penn especially loved shooting features portraits for Vogue. I know because I finally got over my fear of calling him. We worked together (with Vogue’s Phyllis Posnick as his editor and collaborator) until his death in 2009, and I saw firsthand just how uncompromising he was, how firm in his vision, and how you could never talk him into anything.
No one prepared more—usually sketches first, then meticulous lighting, and finally there’d be a hushed, courtly sitting with his subject in his studio. (All of this pursued with solemn dedication, even when, as a gift to me, he shot my three-year-old son and four-year-old daughter.) He could be formal in bearing, but he could also be unexpectedly warm, confiding in me once that he actually hated being called “Mr. Penn.” It was always Irving after that. Vogue Portraits is out October 27, edited by Vogue’s deputy editor Taylor Antrim, with introductory essays by Lena Dunham and Vogue’s head of content, Chloe Malle.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
