IRVING PENN

Renowned for the elegance and aesthetic simplicity of his style across fashion imagery, portraiture and experimental personal work, Irving Penn produced beauty photographs that are distinctive for their understated humour and technical concision. These photographs – many made for Vogue during his 65-year tenure there – illustrate concepts loosely related to the cosmetics featured in the magazine, often employing the same formal qualities established by Surrealism to hybridise editorial imagery with fine art.

Bee on Lips (1995), included in the presentation, is an extreme close-up of a bee crawling across a vividly rouged mouth. Emblematic of Penn’s use of visual puns, it refers to the expression ‘bee-stung lips’, used to refer to the fashion for plumped lips. In Mascara Wars (2001), a bloodshot eye starkly contrasts with the model’s powdered snow-white face, with two mascara wands poised at the base and tip of her eyelashes, suggesting a pause in the action. While Penn is known for his extraordinary ability to capture beauty, his works simultaneously render a latent darkness. Juxtaposed with the inexorability of decay, his works endure precisely because they compel viewers to return again and again in an attempt to comprehend their hidden meaning, drawing parallels with artists such as Man Ray.

Penn’s photographs are consistently characterised by their formal beauty. His sparse compositions and juxtaposition of sharp line with soft flesh create images that are visually arresting, even – or especially – when they verge on the grotesque or painful. In his beauty photographs, it is the unexpected that engages the viewer, prompting Alexander Liberman, editor of Vogue from 1943, to call them ‘stoppers’ – images that make time stand still amid the magazine’s pages.