 Today's episode of the photographic eye is proudly brought to you by Pick Drop. How's it, how's it? I am like super excited because in the end of May, I am gonna fly over to San Francisco to go and check out the work of Irvin Penn. I've arranged to have a little special tour. You know, we're gonna look at it and be sort of giving some insights into the work of this fantastic photographer and then go off and get a chance to talk amongst them with our little community of photographers. And so I'm really excited about that. But why Irvin Penn? Why is his name seemed to surface so much in photography over and above people like, say, Ansel Adams or Richard Avedon? What is it that sets him apart? Now at this point you might be going, well, I've never heard of Irvin Penn, like who is he, what do you want to, right? He is or was rather, I always seem to do that. He is, yeah. Maybe because in my mind they still exist because we have their photographs, isn't that nice? Nice way of sort of thinking about it, but he's the guy on the cover of this very heavy book called Irvin Penn Centennial. It was from a couple of years ago. He's photography for Vogue magazine and all the fashion sort of stuff. He's in the still lives, he's cigarette butt. All of these photographs have something in common. They are pure enjoyment of photography. I know this sounds like a weird thing to say, but if I'm thinking about Ansel Adams or I'm thinking about Avedon, right? Or anybody else who's kind of known for one or maybe two things, I get the feeling, and this is no slight on their work or their approach, that they enjoyed a specific type of photography, right? That very much they were drawn towards one thing and that was their focus. Whereas with Penn, while there's a lot of portrait photography and that's kind of, that's where I was first introduced to his photography, his portrait work, when you start digging into his background, his career, there seems to be a wide range of photographs from shadows on the floor in the early days. He's walking on the city doing things with a camera that quite frankly, a lot of us would be able to do today. And again, this is not to say like probably people might sit there and misconstrued that, say, well, you're saying that we're just as good as Irvin Penn, et cetera. No, that's not what I'm getting at here. What I'm getting at is that Irvin Penn's early work, probably much like a lot of great photographers' early work is something that feels accessible. Like you can look at it and go, oh, that's pretty cool. I can recognize that I could possibly be able to do something similar. So we look at his work and there's some segues into his still life photography. He starts thinking, okay, well, this is a bit more, this is a bit trickier, right? Because it requires a studio and setting up lights and all sorts of things like that there, requires some mentoring by somebody great like Alexei Bondodovich, who was kind of instrumental. A lot of huge photographers, like he mentored Penn and Avidon and many others. Then you look at his still life and you go, oh, look, there's like, there's a fly and there's some weird stuff in there. It feels very much like he's playing with the ideas of introducing elements into a still life that you might see in sort of Renaissance paintings. The other thing, these days we're kind of obsessed with in photography, I think perfection. Everything must be clean. Everything must be just so. And when I look at Irvin Penn's, certainly he's still alive. Every time I go back to them, I see something new in there. So that's a complete departure from what he was doing out in the street. And then of course, you know, he segues into doing portrait photography. And my, you know, my favorite body of Penn's work are these corner portraits, where he contrived to make this set in the studio where the sitter would be placed. And then he said, look, do your own thing, right? You can play around. As a way of thinking about the interaction between the photographer and the sitter, I think in Penn's discussions about this, he talked about how this is a bit like a baseball field where the photographer is the picture throwing out things and the sitter is the better, kind of reacting, doing their own things. And what I love about this is, especially when you contrast this with today's modern celebrity photography, that the difference feels that I'm seeing some personality in Irvin Penn's portraits of these people, and not just the corner stuff, but also the images he did with this piece of carpet, which apparently I think he found in a studio in Paris and was just like, this is my piece of carpet and he kept it forever. I don't know, maybe I have a background here, which is I made it 15 years ago, and I love it, I would never get rid of it. Maybe you have something similar. So those kind of ideas, so then we got street stuff, we got still life, and then you have portrait photography. All things that he's done exceptionally well, but they're completely different genres. Then you kind of segue, cycles through to these things with the cigarette butts and the detritus that you find on the street, old gloves and things of that nature. And I would have to say at this point that I don't get these. It feels kind of, maybe I shouldn't say these kind of things, like I don't get it, but I don't get these. I think it's okay to enjoy somebody's photography and not like all of it. You're not required to enjoy everything. I love Frank Zappa, but some of it I just find is like it's too much, but that's the thing with photography, that I look at pen stuff, I don't dig it, but other people do. So it feels like when I look at urban pens work, and I compare his photography to other big names, that that's what separates them apart. This enjoyment of everything, of trying out all sorts of things. And a modern day equivalent would be a photographer like Dan Winters. I did a video on him I talked about, he's a kind of a, for me, a modern day equivalent of urban pen in so much as he seems to take photographs of all sorts of stuff. Then somebody got a little bit annoyed because you can't compare Winters with the master pen and stuff like that. Of course you can, that you can have similarities and things. We need to get off this idea that certain people, you can't ever compare against it. If you see their fingerprints in other people's work, then that's cool, other people are like, you know, saying, oh, you know, I recognize that, great. And I'm using it to inform my own images. The lesson that I sort of take away from Penn's photography and again, my interpretation of his approach to photography is that he wasn't sort of shoehorning himself into one particular thing or another. It was just, I'm just going to photograph whatever I feel like it. There's a tendency, I think certainly amongst a huge number of photographers, to think of ourselves as a particular type of photographer. Even though I try not to, if you held a gun to my head and you say, what are you, I'll be like, I'm a portrait photographer. Despite the fact that I don't really, I was forced into, I was an accidental portrait photographer. You know, there's this idea that we need to label ourselves. And that's why I think when I think about Penn, I don't think fashion photographer, I don't think portrait photographer, I don't think landscape photographer, or still life photographer. I just think photographer. And so Adam's landscape, Richard Averton is a portrait slash fashion photographer. Look at his work. Get the excitement that Penn had for his subject, why he turned his camera to you. That's why I'm so excited to go and see his print. I've never seen any urban print, urban print, hey, urban pen prints. I say that six times in a row, right? In the flesh. I want to feel like I'm close to him, close to the artist, the person who created these images. If you'd like to join me, there's a couple of spots still left on the Saturday talk. It's so good, I'm going twice, right? The Friday and the Saturday. And there'll be a link in the description box below about this. I would love to see you there. And if you're in DC, I'm also gonna check out the George Hurrell exhibition at the NPG in Washington that the following week. So yeah, so there we go. Anyway, I really hope that you enjoyed this, this look at urban pen. If you'd like to find out more about down winters, if I compare to Penn, check out this really long, interesting video that I did where I interviewed the man himself, Penn. I wish Penn, I wish Winters over here. Thanks ever so much for watching and I will see you again soon.