Irving Penn
Sat everyone in the same plain corner and printed in platinum for sixty years.
Irving Penn was born at Plainfield in New Jersey in 1917, trained under Alexey Brodovitch, and spent almost his entire career with Vogue from 1943. The method was reduction: a plain grey or white backdrop, natural north light, and a subject given nothing to lean on — or, in the famous series, an actual narrow corner built from two flats into which sitters from Duchamp to Stravinsky were wedged. He photographed fashion, still life, cigarette ends and street debris with the same attention, and travelled to photograph tradespeople and, in the field, communities in Peru, Dahomey and New Guinea. He died in 2009.
Penn revived platinum-palladium printing in the 1960s and made those prints himself, coating the paper by hand and often mounting it to aluminium; they are physically distinct from his gelatin silver prints of the same images and are the ones most sought. Process, print date and edition therefore identify a work, not the image alone. Signature, edition number and stamps are normally on the verso. The Irving Penn Foundation holds the archive. Platinum prints are robust but the mounts are not, and edge damage is common.
If you own a work by Irving Penn
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.