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    Dreamlife

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    daddypanama
    Irving Penn, Lisa Fonssagrives, Vogue, photography, glam, straight page-flipping males, Issey Miyake, art, Tokyo, New York, JGS, Howard Stein, Paris, poetry, Guedras In the Wind, Fashion Cemetery, hot, drop-dead, supermodels, skulls, butts, myth, magical falsehoods, tsar, voluptuous, youth obsessed, old age

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    Dreamlife

    Uploaded by

    daddypanama
    1K views4 pages
    Irving Penn, Lisa Fonssagrives, Vogue, photography, glam, straight page-flipping males, Issey Miyake, art, Tokyo, New York, JGS, Howard Stein, Paris, poetry, Guedras In the Wind, Fashion Cemetery, hot, drop-dead, supermodels, skulls, butts, myth, magical falsehoods, tsar, voluptuous, youth obsessed, old age

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    Irving Penn, Lisa Fonssagrives, Vogue, photography, glam, straight page-flipping males, Issey Miyake, art, Tokyo, New York, JGS, Howard Stein, Paris, poetry, Guedras In the Wind, Fashion Cemetery, hot, drop-dead, supermodels, skulls, butts, myth, magical falsehoods, tsar, voluptuous, youth obsessed, old age

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    1K views4 pages

    Dreamlife

    Uploaded by

    daddypanama
    Irving Penn, Lisa Fonssagrives, Vogue, photography, glam, straight page-flipping males, Issey Miyake, art, Tokyo, New York, JGS, Howard Stein, Paris, poetry, Guedras In the Wind, Fashion Cemetery, hot, drop-dead, supermodels, skulls, butts, myth, magical falsehoods, tsar, voluptuous, youth obsessed, old age

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    Some key takeaways are that Irving Penn had a long and illustrious career photographing for Vogue over 60 years, photographing not just models but unusual subjects like sewing machines and skulls. He is seen as embodying the fashion industry.

    Irving Penn's relationship with designers like Issey Miyake was often mystical. Miyake would ship his clothes from Tokyo to Paris for Penn to photograph, and Penn would return astonishing platinum prints in exchange without much direct interaction.

    Penn's sitters often described their experiences with him as 'séances' and were impressed by his intensity, benevolence and ability to create intimacy through silence in their photo sessions.

    .

    Dreamlife
    text by Robert Goethals, photography by Irving Penn

    Amber Valletta, Irving Penn, estate

    In Americas money-scarfing, youth-obsessed fashion biz, photographers can go from cold to hot faster than a drop-dead model can shiver her slim fingers down the slopes of her hips. Sometimes it appears the industrys only permanent fixture is the nastiness of its dominant tsars. Yet the fashion photographer, Irving Penn, forever an emblem of Vogue, shot stunning women for over 60 years straight. His impossibly chic images of Lisa Fonssagrives, a Swedish ballerina and arguably the worlds first supermodel, first emblazoned Vogues pages back in 1947. Yet it wasnt just irresistible women with their perfectly shaped noses, voluptuous lips, and bewitching eyes whom Mr. Penn immortalized. He immortalized sewing machines, skulls, and cigarette butts, too. Penn made Jell-O look so desirable it took on the wayward quality of a dream. This doyen of the fashion world died one year ago, aged 92, gigging right down to the end. For haute coutures dispossessed, Irving Penn is a savior: a man whose work ethic was so tireless and persistent, no gravestone in our sprawling Fashion Cemetery will ever cap his luminous vision.

    Irving Penn, Vogue U.S.A.

    In 1930s, the American woman made a giant leap off the pedestal of the prim and proper. She smiled easily, acquired a real body, and began breezily running and jumping through all the glamour magazines, forcing every straight, pageflipping male to reevaluate his sorry life. A decade later, cutting through all commercial myth making and falsehoods, Irving Penn thoughtfully refined these images into those that made sophisticated, strong, and independent women feel good about themselves. Penns photographs were less about the surfaces and textures of what women wore than about the women themselves. He broke through the magical radiance in which they dwelled.

    Girl with Tiny Goggles, Irving Penn, Vogue U.S.A.

    Penns sitters often described their experiences with the photographer as sances. They were impressed by Penns intensity, his benevolence, and how words became lost in the silence and softness of intervals, as they approached

    the moment in which an intimacy would suddenly be revealed. His relationship with designers was often equally mystical. Issey Miyake rarely visited Penns hallowed studios, nor did the aristocratic photographer bother to materialize amid the hurly burly of the legendary Japanese designers fashion shows. Miyake simply shipped his clothes from Tokyo to Paris, to patiently await a series of astonishing platinum prints in return. Irving Penn shows me what I do, Miyake once mused. In the business of being beautiful, for Penn, there was no poverty of the soul. Just pure unadulterated poetry.

    Irving Penn. Guedras In the Wind. JGS, Inc. Permanent Collection

    ~ Robert Goethals, October, 2010

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