New Guinea Man with Painted-On Glasses

Celebrated for sixty years of masterly work at Vogue magazine beginning in the 1940s, Irving Penn was a superb photographer of style. And yet his attention to fashion was merely one aspect of his lifelong study of face and figure, attitude and demeanor, adornment and artifact. As his penetrating portraits reveal, Penn had few equals as an observer of human expression. From 1967 to 1971 he traveled with a bespoke tent studio and made field portraits from Morocco to Melanesia, from Crete to Nepal. As he wrote, “The studio became, for each of us, a sort of neutral area. It was not their home, as I had brought this alien enclosure into their lives; it was not my home, as I had obviously come from elsewhere, from far away. But in this limbo there was for us both the possibility of contact that was a revelation to me and often, I could tell, a moving experience for the subjects themselves, who without words—by only their stance and their concentration—were able to say much that spanned the gulf between our different worlds.”

Although sensitive to the impending loss of the cultures he visited, Penn was not an anthropologist. His focus was meeting and depicting others, an experience of authenticity that gratified and grounded him. The portraits also satisfied his Vogue editor, Diana Vreeland, whose zeal for countercultural fashion trends was served by these studies of unfamiliar costume and bodily adornment.