Irving Penn First Edition 1980 FlowersFashion Still Life Photography HC w/DJ

Up For Sale Today is

Flowers

Photography by

Irving Penn

Hardcover. 4to. Harmony Books, New York. 1980. 94 pgs. Illustrated with Color Plates. First Edition/First Printing. 

DJ has light shelf-wear present to the DJ extremities. Bound in cloth boards with titles present to the spine. Boards have light shelf-wear present to the extremities. No ownership marks present.  Text is clean and free of marks. Binding tight and solid.

Presents the celebrated photographer's seventy-three remarkable portrait studies of the poppy, the rose, the peony, the lily, the orchid, the begonia, and the tulip at each stage of growth, from bud to death

FROM WIKIPEDIA:

Irving Penn (June 16, 1917 – October 7, 2009) was an American photographer known for his fashion photography, portraits, and still lifes. Penn's career included work at Vogue magazine, and independent advertising work for clients including Issey Miyake, and Clinique. His work has been exhibited internationally, and continues to inform the art of photography.

Best known for his fashion photography,Penn's repertoire also includes portraits of creative greats; ethnographic photographs from around the world; Modernist still lifes of food, bones, bottles, metal, and found objects; and photographic travel essays.

Penn was among the first photographers to pose subjects against a simple grey or white backdrop and he effectively used this simplicity. Expanding his austere studio surroundings, Penn constructed a set of upright angled backdrops, to form a stark, acute corner. Subjects photographed with this technique included Martha Graham, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Georgia O'Keeffe, W. H. Auden, and Igor Stravinsky.

Penn's still life compositions are spare and highly organized, assemblages of food or objects that articulate the abstract interplay of line and volume. Penn's photographs are composed with a great attention to detail, which continues into his craft of developing and making prints of his photographs. Penn experimented with many printing techniques, including prints made on aluminum sheets coated with a platinum emulsion rendering the image with a warmth that untoned silver prints lacked. His black and white prints are notable for their deep contrast, giving them a clean, crisp look.

While steeped in the Modernist tradition, Penn also ventured beyond creative boundaries. The exhibition of Earthly Bodies consisted of series of posed nudes whose physical shapes range from thin to plump; while the photographs were taken in 1949 and 1950, they were not exhibited until 1980, perhaps in part because of questions about the public reception of the graphic representations of the female nude.