About the artist
Born in 1917 to immigrant parents in Plainfield, New Jersey, Irving Penn attended the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art from 1934-38 and studied with Alexey Brodovitch in his Design Laboratory. His first photographic cover for Vogue magazine appeared in October 1943 and he would continue to work at the magazine throughout his career. In the 1950s, he founded his own studio in New York and began taking advertising photographs alongside his private, experimental work. In the early 1970s, Penn closed his Manhattan studio and immersed himself in platinum-palladium printing in the laboratory he had constructed on the family farm on Long Island. There he created his innovative Cigarettes series, which was shown in his first exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1975, as well as his Street Material series, shown at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York in 1977.

The first retrospective of Penn's work was organised by The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1984 and toured internationally to countries including Japan, France, Spain, Germany, Sweden, Israel, Italy and the UK. He donated his archives to the Art Institute Chicago in 1995, and established The Irving Penn Foundation in 2005 to promote knowledge and understanding of his artistic legacy, including the diversity of techniques, mediums and subject matter that he explored. Recent exhibitions of the artist's work include Irving Penn: Beyond Beauty at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. (2015), Irving Penn: Centennial at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2017), which travelled to the RMN - Grand Palais, Paris; C/O Berlin and the Instituto Moreira Salles, São Paulo and Irving Penn, Chefs d'œuvres de la collection de la MEP at the Franciscaines in Deauville (2023).