Around 1948, photographer Irving Penn began making unusual portraits of a number of writers, artists, musicians, politicians, dancers and other celebrities. The photographic studio ceases to be a neutral environment to become an active agent in the creation of the photographic reality. Irving Penn had already begun to use the studio as a place revelead in the photograph, as the viewer is allowed to see electrical cables and photographic material scattered on the floor. With the corner portraits, the studio becomes a veritable architectural limiter of the subject movements and the resulting compressed and claustrophobic environment isolates the subjects’ personalities in an abstract, artificial corner of the world.
“Sometime in 1948 I began photographing portraits in a small corner space made of two studio flats pushed together, the floor covered with a piece of old carpeting… a very rich series of pictures resulted. This confinement, surprisingly seemed to comfort people, soothing them. The walls were a surface to lean on or push against. For me the picture possibilities were interesting; limiting the subjects movements seemed to relieve me of part of the problem of holding onto them.”~Irving Penn
Marcel Duchamp
Subjects Unidentified
Elsa Schiaparelli
Georgia O’Keeffe
Georgia O’Keeffe
Gilbert Adrian
Arthur Rubinstein
Gypsy Rose Lee Penn
Igor Stravinsky
Jascha Heifetz
Joe Louis
Kay Thompson and the Williams Brothers
Arthur Koestler
Louis Armstrong
Marlene Dietrich
Martha Graham
Mrs William Rhinelander Stewart
Salvador Dalí
Spencer Tracey
The Duchess of Windsor
Truman Capote
Walter Gropius
Maurice Chevalier
Jerome Robbins
OKTANA by Raskolnick 