Irving Penn and the art of looking beyond the image Review of the exhibition 'L'Essence du portrait'

By Benedetta de Martino

L’Essence du portrait explores the remarkable artistic vision of Irving Penn, one of the twentieth century’s most influential photographers.

Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Miles Davis, Yves Saint Laurent: names deeply embedded in our collective imagination, figures whose identities seem to precede any encounter with their faces. In Irving Penn’s photographs, however, this familiar perception begins to unravel. Celebrities gradually shed the attributes associated with their public personas, while artists relinquish the roles that made them famous. For Penn, taking a photograph meant constructing an image with the same compositional awareness as a painter, while exercising an almost surgical precision in his approach to reality. In his portraits, the public persona recedes, allowing a more vulnerable, sometimes enigmatic, yet unmistakably human presence to emerge beneath the carefully constructed identity. Penn regarded the camera as an almost sacred instrument, approaching it with profound reverence. Its power lay in its ability to achieve absolute formal precision while simultaneously penetrating the psychological depths of the person standing before the lens.

Penn’s ambition was to look beyond the fame of those who stood before his lens. He understood that every sitter arrived in the studio carrying a carefully constructed image of themselves, a repertoire of mannerisms, defences and expectations that the photographer had to find a way to dismantle. This is why he familiarised himself with each subject’s work beforehand, taking time to engage in conversation, often over a cup of coffee, before the camera was even brought into play. The portrait thus began with an encounter, a relationship between two individuals. [...]