Irving Penn

"In a career that spans more than fifty years, American photographer Irving Penn (born 1917) has created some of the most arresting portraits, influential fashion studies, and provocative still lifes of the twentieth century. In the early 1960s when he turned from magazine work to platinum printing, he reinterpreted his earlier photographs, transforming them into the independent works of art that have been celebrated for the last thirty years. Extensively with the platinum process, making innumerable test strips in his quest to achieve remarkably subtle, rich tonal ranges and luxurious textures. When Penn rediscovered these test trips in the late 1980s, he arranged them in seventeen provocative collages, the Platinum Test Materials, which represent timeless meditations on his entire career: in demonstrating his search for perfection - and the difficulties in obtaining it - he has made this quest the very subject of his art." "This book reproduces the seventeen Platinum Test Materials, as well as the eighty-five platinum prints that are represented in these collages. Some of Penn's most important photographs are included, from portraits of Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, David Smith, and Saul Steinberg; to studies of indigenous peoples in New Guinea; innovative still lifes; and celebrated fashion studies."--Jacket.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.