While researching this article, I came across a headline that read: “Fashion People Do Eat.” In just four loaded words, the author expressed the sometimes fraught relationship between food and fashion. One place where the two coexist, stunningly, beautifully, is in the still lifes Irving Penn shot for Vogue to illustrate stories on topics from chilled soups to cheese. In fact it was food, not French finery, that was the subject of the photographer’s first and last published images for the magazine: healthy and handily “point-free” shellfish for a wartime story titled “Sea Harvest” in 1943, and bananas, in 2009, for a story on the signs of aging, “She’s Come Undone.”
Though Penn was a perfectionist—“If we were photographing a hand holding a pizza, it had to be the pizza-maker s hand,” recalls editor Phyllis Posnick, his close collaborator—ripeness was not paramount for the photographer, who was fascinated by all phases of beauty, both full and faded. Take Penn’s famous image of a cigarette stub; it is at once clinically precise and richly narrative, telling the story of desire satisfied, and of dignity in finality, frozen forever in film.
Penn’s preferred subjects, food, flowers, and fashion, were all inherently ephemeral, and he saw beauty in all manner of things and in every stage of life. His presence was in every photograph; this is especially true for his images of food. The perfection, and wit, of the compositions, whether they are anthropomorphic, or Vermeer-like, reveal Penn’s presence of eye—and hand. Penn “had been trained as a painter, and every time I described the concept for an article or showed him clothes, he would sit across the table from me and draw,” Posnick has written. “He sketched almost everything he photographed and the photographs looked exactly like his sketches.”
With the launch of Vogue.com’s expanded Living section in mind, we dug into the our archive and selected ten of Irving Penn’s most memorable photographs of food in Vogue.
Shop Vogue archival prints in the Condé Nast Store now.
