Arriving in the maritime city of A Coruña, Galicia, feels like stepping into a land that embraces with open arms all the changes and innovations that arrive from across the ocean.
“Irving Penn: Centennial” is the fourth in a series of world-class exhibitions presented by the MOP Foundation. Its president, Marta Ortega Pérez, states, “Irving Penn’s image-making is exemplary. In Penn’s hands, the everyday becomes extraordinary, revealing the profound beauty in simplicity.”
The exhibition opens at the port pier with a striking installation that includes rare film footage of Irving Penn at work. This footage, captured by his wife, Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, shows his custom-made portable tent studio in the Moroccan town of Guelmim. The images taken there would later be included in his book Worlds in a Small Room (1974).
Penn’s service time in Italy and India during World War II inspired his desire to photograph people across the globe. Between 1967 and 1971, he lived that dream, traveling for Vogue to the Pacific and Africa with his tent studio in tow.
This tent studio became a unique, neutral space for his subjects. Penn remarked: “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.”
Though Penn was not an anthropologist, he sought to create exquisitely detailed and carefully composed portraits. While not aiming to echo the stereotypes of ethnographic photography, the isolation of his sitters against a blank ground inevitably recalls colonialist traditions.
Irving Penn was one of the twentieth century’s greatest photographers, celebrated for his meticulous approach, minimalist style, masterful printmaking, and bold artistic experimentation. His uncanny ability to infuse his photographs with timelessness and narrative depth is evident in his portraits of laborers, fashion models, and even aging flowers. Penn’s work reflects a relentless pursuit of perfection and an unerring eye for detail that extended to every aspect of his craft, from composition to printmaking.
Organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and presented exclusively in Spain at the MOP Foundation space in A Coruña, the exhibition showcases approximately 175 of Penn’s works. These include his portraits of celebrities, cultural luminaries, laborers with their tools, abstract nudes, early documentary street scenes, compositions of flowers, signage, street debris, fashion studies, and meticulously constructed still lives.
Still life was Irving Penn’s first and perhaps most enduring love in photography. It was in this genre that he established the rigorous, compressed language that defined his long career. Among his earliest assignments for Vogue after joining in 1943, his still-life compositions demonstrated his role as a storyteller – albeit one who deliberately excluded human protagonists. What remained were their traces: an alluring smear of lipstick on a brandy glass, a burnt match. These meticulously arranged photographs revealed Penn’s bravura act of reduction, stripping the world down to its essentials. He challenged viewers to discern an internal order within these images and to read them for lingering signs of life.
Later, in the 1980s, Penn’s creative world expanded through an extraordinary long-term collaboration with Japanese designer Issey Miyake. Each year, Miyake sent his creations to Penn, whom he deeply admired, to photograph. Inspired by Miyake’s inventive and structurally daring designs, Penn responded with images that matched their ingenuity. This exchange became a fertile dialogue between two visionary artists, with Penn’s photographs transforming Miyake’s garments into visual poetry that celebrated their shared pursuit of innovation.
The exhibition delves into Penn’s deep fascination with the ephemerality and complexity of the human condition. This is evident not only in his portraits, but also in his masterful still lives, which bookend his career. Long before photography was widely recognized as a fine art, Penn approached it with the same rigor and nuance, pairing his compositional skills with an extraordinary ability to capture human expression, attitude, and demeanor.
Opening to the public at the MOP Foundation on November 23, 2024, and running through May 1, 2025, “Irving Penn: Centennial” stands as the most comprehensive retrospective of the photographer’s work to date, revealing his extraordinary artistic versatility and the remarkable range of his oeuvre.
