The fashion photographer Irving Penn's work at the Cardi Gallery in Milan

After thirty years of waiting since the last exhibition in Milan, Irving Penn‘s photographic work returns to be showed with an exclusive free exhibition at the Cardi Gallery, which will be open until December 22nd.

Pioneer of a ‘pictorial’ and an evocative fashion photography, Irving Penn, a native of New Jersey, citizen of the world and post-War artist, contributed to the hybrid change of photography in fashion magazines and to the birth of hypnotic covers, which for Vogue America there were a lot, precisely 150. But there’s more. Irving Penn was also the author of reportages, ethnographic essays and still lifes, establishing himself since the 1940s as a multifaceted artist, visionary and stranger to any aesthetic contingency of the time.

It is precisely with Irving Penn that, at the time, the figure of the fashion photographer is established, crossing the passive side of photographic composition to play with dynamism and the need to arouse a ‘sense of escape’ in the reader/spectator, during a gray and emotionally distant post-War period. His creative mission was to bring fashion from ‘astral’ to ‘terrestrial’ fashion dream. His sociological images portrayed elegant women in sublime dresses, highlighted by an almost obsessive attention to composition and lighting, which intelligently recreated geometric spaces between the angles of the body and the monochromatic backgrounds of the sets, for a dynamic result.

With two dedicated floors of the Cardi Gallery, the “Irving Penn” exhibition, curated by the Irving Penn Foundation, traces the salient points of his process of modernization of the photographic medium up to the Nineties, and his emotional bond with Italy, with works located on the first floor of the exhibition space in Via Porta Nuova.

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Priscilla Cafaggi

Priscilla è una fashion editor laureata in storia della moda. Ama il vintage, il minimalismo… in poche parole una persona eclettica. Infatti, se dovesse scegliere due persone per andare a cena fuori sarebbero Jil Sander e Alessandro Michele.