Irving Penn - Dahomey 1967

Commissioned by Vogue, which he had been working for since1943, Irving Penn produced a series of photographs on Dahomey (now the Republic of Bénin). To do this he created a mobile, collapsible studio strong enough to resist the wind, the hot sun and the rain but light enough to be easily transported from place to place. Inviting local people to leave their environment, just as he had left his familiar New York studio, Irving Penn found that a new relationship between photographer and model was made possible by the particular space of the travelling studio. He used a similar arrangement for further anthropological series in Nepal (1967), Cameroon (1969), New Guinea (1970) and Morocco (1971). The originality of his work lies in the way he succeeds in engaging in a truly creative reflexion on photographic form and medium within the framework of a commission. Pressetext

Irving Penn - Dahomey 1967, photographs