Irving Penn - Photographs New York Friday, April 5, 2024 | Phillips
  • “The modern photographer…brings equal interest and devotion to the problem of photographing a queen, a chair, a fashion model, a soldier, a horse. He finds something of himself in everything, and something of everything in himself.”
    —Irving Penn

    Invoking and updating the centuries-old printmaking tradition known as small trades, street cries, or petits métiers, Irving Penn’s Small Trades series highlights photography’s unique ability to serve as a lens of social and cultural study. In this extensive body of work from the 1950s, Penn invited trades workers into the neutral setting of his studio – paying them a small fee – and captured them with all the accessories of their trade. In Charbonnier, Paris Penn photographed a coal delivery man wearing his backing hat, or coalman hat, which protected his back and shoulders from coal dust as he hauled coal door to door.

     

    In 2008, Penn spoke with the deepest respect and empathy for the daily lives of working men and women, describing his Small Trades photographs as “residual images of enchantment.” Today, Charbonnier exists as a record of a bygone trade and a testament to Penn’s artistry as a social documentarian and brilliant portraitist. This work was purchased in 1980 from Marlborough Gallery at one of the earliest gallery showings of Penn’s Small Trades series.

     

     

    Read more abot the collection

    • Provenance

      Marlborough Graphics Gallery, London, 1985

    • Literature

      Knopf, Irving Penn: Passage, p. 90

    • Artist Biography

      Irving Penn

      American • 1917 - 2009

      Arresting portraits, exquisite flowers, luscious food and glamorous models populate Irving Penn's meticulously rendered, masterful prints. Penn employed the elegant simplicity of a gray or white backdrop to pose his subjects, be it a model in the latest Parisian fashion, a famous subject or veiled women in Morocco.

      Irving Penn's distinct aesthetic transformed twentieth-century elegance and style, with each brilliant composition beautifully articulating his subjects. Working across several photographic mediums, Penn was a master printmaker. Regardless of the subject, each and every piece is rendered with supreme beauty. 

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FIGURE + FORM: PHOTOGRAPHS FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION

326

Charbonnier, Paris

1950
Platinum-palladium print, printed 1974.
16 3/4 x 11 5/8 in. (42.5 x 29.5 cm)
Signed, titled, dated, numbered in pencil, copyright credit and edition stamps on the verso. Number 13 from an edition of 31.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$30,000 - 50,000 

Contact Specialist

Sarah Krueger
Head of Department, Photographs
skrueger@phillips.com
 

Vanessa Hallett
Worldwide Head of Photographs and Chairwoman, Americas
vhallett@phillips.com

Photographs

New York Auction 5 April 2024