Irving Penn Still Life

Irving Penn Still Life

Introduction by John Szarkowski Boston: Bulfinch Press, 2001

Although one cannot compare Penn's magazine still lifes with those that had come before, one can say that their character was parallel to the character of his portraits and his fashion pictures, which is to say that they were very surprising, and produced a pleasurable frisson—an awareness that we were suddenly in unfamiliar territory. His fashion pictures claimed that the new gowns were so good that they did not need to play second fiddle to some fanciful fairy-tale narrative, and his portraits claimed that these people were so interesting that they did not need to be photographed with a castle or a symphony orchestra, or a marvelous Neopolitan slum in the background. And the still lifes claimed too that the quotidian raw materials of cooking and eating—heads of cheese, cleavers, sides of beef, sculpted butcher blocks, and also abandoned demitasse cups, cigarette butts on saucers, lipstick stains on a liquor glass, etc.—if properly seen, contained all the necessary plot elements and the essential hints from which any reasonable reader might construct a story proper to her own circumstance. ... In 1972 came the enormously surprising pictures of cigarette butts. The shock of these pictures derived from their terrific, chilly elegance. The detritus of the street had taken on an exact nobility, like fragments of the heraldry of some lost culture, or the shards of sculpture on the floor of a classical temple. The effect came in part from the extraordinary physical beauty of these pictures as objects.

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Irving Penn continued

John Szarkowski