Artworks

Irving Penn is best-known for his fashion photography at Vogue but also his powerful portraiture, modernist compositions and photographic travel essays. His portrait of Jacob Epstein, then aged seventy, was shot in London in 1950, four years before Epstein's knighthood, in the last decade of the sculptor's career. Three months earlier, in Paris, inspired by Eugene Atget's photographs of workers, Penn had posed Parisian celebrities, including the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, in their working clothes, accompanied by the tools of their trade. Later, in London, he also photographed London traders including chimney sweeps, newspaper sellers, and a coalman, suitably dusted with soot. Epstein's influence upon Penn can be seen in the latter’s photograph of the Steel Mill Firefighter, reminiscent of Epstein’s 1913 radical, robot-like sculpture, Rock Drill. Penn presents Epstein as a still powerful, working figure, whom, seven years later, in a text accompanying Geoffrey Ireland's photographs of Epstein's collection of ethnographic sculpture, Laurie Lee would describe as ‘a broad-boned working figure, homely as a riveter, untouched by the professional vanities of dress and posture’. The Ben Uri archive also includes three press photographs of Epstein and his work.