Irving Penn

1917: Irving Penn was born in Plainfield, New Jersey on June 16, to Russian parents who had immigrated to New York.

1934-38: Attends the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art to join, in 1936, the "Design Laboratory" founded by Alexey Brodovitch. Upon graduation, he became art director for Junior League Magazine and the Saks Fifth Avenue department store in New York.

1941-42: Goes to live in Coyoacán, Mexico, with his first wife, Nonny Gardner.

1943: Appointed art director of Vogue, Alexander Liberman hired Penn to design the magazine's covers. Penn would work for the magazine for over sixty years, despite a brief hiatus during World War II.

1944-45: Volunteers with the American Field Service, an ambulance service developed by the Americans in Europe. He returned to New York in November 1945.

1947: Staged for Vogue the "twelve most photographed models" and met on this occasion the top model and former Swedish dancer Lisa Fonssagrives, whom he married 3 years later. Their son Tom was born in 1952.

1948: Travels to Lima, Peru at the end of the year for a fashion editorial with model Jean Patchett and editor Babs Simpson. During the Christmas period, rents a studio in Cuzco to photograph local people.

1950: In a natural light studio at 85 rue de Vaugirard in Paris, Penn made photographs of haute couture with Lisa Fonssagrives as a model, as well as portraits for his "Small Trades" series.

1964-65: Begins experimenting with the platinum printing process, a 19th century craft technique. Sets up a laboratory dedicated to this process in a barn on his property in Huntington, Long Island.

1967-71: Built a portable studio tent to take portraits during his travels: Dahomey (now Benin), Nepal, Cameroon, New Guinea, Morocco.

1972: Collects cigarette butts and photographs them with a microscope lens. The print occupied him for fifteen months.

1995: Manufactures a "street camera" to discreetly photograph the littered sidewalks and gutters of New York City. Series of photographs with "moving light", a motorized lamp projecting a narrow band of light during long exposure times.

2005 : Creation of the Irving Penn Foundation.

2009: Irving Penn dies in New York on October 7.