Vogue’s top photographer for decades showcased at Wichita Art Museum

What can we learn from haute couture today, when the concept of high fashion often seems trivial compared to more weighty issues?

Perhaps a look at Irving Penn, one of the most celebrated photographers of the 20th century, is in order.

Penn was a photographer for Vogue Magazine from 1943 until his death in 2009, a pioneer in the world of fashion photography – among other specialties.

A wide-ranging retrospective of his photography recently opened at the Wichita Art Museum, continuing the museum’s increasing desire to showcase photography.

Penn is perhaps best known for his fashion photography, but to appreciate Penn fully, a chronological look at his career is necessary.

The Wichita Art Museum exhibition is designed for that purpose, featuring 146 works from as early as the 1940s to as recent as 2007.

In the exhibition, it’s clear that Penn’s obsessive attention to detail began early in portraits of storefront windows, street signs and still lifes.

Later, it seems as if he treats his celebrities as still lifes, letting the texture and shape of their garments provide the focal point of the frame.

Colin Westerbeck, photography curator at the Arts Institute of Chicago, was a friend of Penn’s, having met him following a New York gallery show around 1991.

Westerbeck said though “the first part of his career was very devoted to (typical) genres at a fashion magazine – fashion photography and celebrity portraiture – Penn’s interest always went beyond that.”

“Penn, while very pleased with ... and very intent on making as much money as he could as a fashion and celebrity photographer, nevertheless always wanted to innovate and bring new things, new ideas into the magazine,” Westerbeck said.

Take for example Penn’s work in Cuzco, on display in the exhibition.

Penn made a personal trip to the city over Christmas of 1948 to photograph rural Peruvians in the city, dressed in traditional garb.

That work, seemingly far-removed from haute couture, eventually appeared in Vogue.

Photography was arguably the most important new artistic medium to come out of the 21st century, Westerbeck said, and Penn’s career largely paralleled that of the rise of photography: he shot both with Rolleiflexes and made silver dye-bleach prints later in his career.

Penn also found plenty of work as a commercial photographer, though that part of his career is not on display at the Wichita Art Museum exhibition.

“He was always practical and high-minded at the same time,” Westerbeck said. “He had a great capacity to reconcile those two impulses.”

This exhibition opened at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2015, and subsequently traveled to Dallas, Cambridge, Mass.; Nashville and Pittsburgh before coming to Wichita.

Earlier this year, a newly designed retrospective of Penn’s work opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“Irving Penn: Beyond Beauty” is on display at the Wichita Art Museum, 1400 W. Museum Blvd., until Feb. 4, 2018.

This story was originally published October 19, 2017 at 11:04 AM with the headline "Vogue’s top photographer for decades showcased at Wichita Art Museum."