Facing Forward
Penn Finds a New Beauty: The brilliance of Irving Penn's 1960s photography captured cultural change with a modern lens.
By Condé Nast Archive
by Ivan Shaw
Model wearing Yellow Sungoggles, Vogue (1965-04-01) by Irving PennCondé Nast Archive
Irving Penn’s pictures of 1950's couture for Vogue are among the most iconic images in the history of photography. Their magnificence has attracted so much éclat that much of the work that Penn did during the following decade hasn’t received the attention it deserves.
Fashion and the culture went through a seismic shift in the 1960s; Penn picked up on the new cultural currents and filtered them, literally and figuratively, through his lens—after making some adjustments in the studio, that is.
To best capture the dynamism of the new decade, Penn created a light that had “Pop.” He also swapped out the quiet beauty of his usual gray canvas background for a stark, ultra-modern white one.
Penn was in a moment of personal and professional development at this time: In 1960 he published his first book, Moments Preserved, and made his gallery debut at Alexandre Iolas in New York.
While he remained busy shooting print ads, he expanded into a new medium, television, with an ad series commissioned by Pepsi. Concurrently he was mastering the time-honored art of platinum/palladium printing in his studio.
There was nothing old-fashioned about the Youthquake’s new faces. Replacing the classic beauty of mid-century greats, like Dovima and Jean Patchett, was an appreciation for more eccentric looks.
The gamine Twiggy became a household name, while German-born Veruschka and all-American Lauren Hutton were Vogue’s top cover girls.
A look through back issues of the magazine reveals that Penn—who was married to model Lisa Fonssagrives, the archetypal 1950s face—had an eye for all kinds of beauty.
For the August 1st, 1965 issue of Vogue, Penn turned his beauty eye to the ’60's hottest ticket on Broadway: Barbra Streisand. Through the lens of Penn, Streisand appears like a Greek statue with a white fur wrap and glove that look like marble.
Veruschka, sporting hair rings by Paraphernalia that look less like accessories than Pop Art pieces, was his subject for a shoot that ran in the June 1966 issue of Vogue. Penn captured the model looking like a character in a science fiction story.
Hats and scarves were also essential to the ’60s-era beauty look. Penn, always with an eye toward the abstract, turned these headpieces into Cubist abstractions.
Penn, always a man of his times, found in the 1960s a new light, a new setting, and a new point of view.
Just as Veruschka seemed to be a character from another time and place, models like Wilhelmina Cooper and Astrid Heeren might easily have been at home in a painting by Picasso or Braque.
As he had done before and as he would do again in later decades, Penn defined for Vogue and its readers what was truly modern.
