The Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris has one of the most significant and complete European collections of the works of the American Photographer Irving Penn (1917-2009). This unique ensemble is primarily the result of the longstanding and close relationship between MEP and the artist himself, during his lifetime, and more recently a close and precious collaboration with The Irving Penn Foundation, led by his son, Tom Penn. Today the MEP holds over 100 vintage works, which not only span the entirely of Penn’s working life, but includes some of his most celebrated and iconic images. This presentation of 80 works, specially selected for KYOTOGRAPHIE by MEP, offers its audience in Japan an unparalleled insight, not only into the richness and diversity of Penn’s images but also his incredible skill as a print-maker. Penn’s photographs, in silver gelatin, platinum-palladium, and colour processes, are among the most highly cherished in the history of photography, effortlessly bringing to life, and in the highest possible quality, the whole range of photographic genres from still life and landscape, to portraiture and fashion. It is with the latter in mind that KYOTOGRAPHIE and MEP have worked closely with our colleagues at Maison Dior in Japan and France to bring this priceless body of work to a new audience for the first time.
 

From his earliest documentary work in late 1930s America, and during the Second World War, to his poignant final still life pictures, Irving Penn strived always to produce photographs of the very highest quality. As such he is perhaps without equal in being celebrated as much for his pictorial ingenuity in commercial and commissioned work as for his expressive artistry. There are no distinctions in quality in Penn’s oeuvre between the absolute attention given to an apparently simple still life, even a crushed cigarette or piece of gum, and the beauty and sophistication of his fashion pictures or celebrity portraits. Each subject finds its proper place, and achieves its artistic status through a complex and life-learned process of looking, thinking, composition and perfect technical reproduction.

[Quotation from the introduction text by Simon Baker, Director of Maison Européenne de la Photographie]