Penn Photographs
Penn's "Small Trades" Photographs
The J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles announced that it had acquired the entire series of "Small Trades" photographs which consists of 252 silver-gelatin and platinum prints of full-length portraits of workers — waiters, bakers, butchers, rag-and-bone men. It has been called Mr. Penn’s most extensive body of work.
He began taking them in Paris in the summer of 1950 on assignment for Vogue and he continued it for another year after the assignment, seeking out workers in London and then in New York, where he lived, asking them to come to his studio in their work clothes and carrying the tools of their trade.
August Sander took naturalistic, anthropological portraits of German tradespeople and professionals usually in the settings where they worked. Mr. Penn’s portraits on the other hand, are formal. He always tried to use natural northern light and posed each subject against a neutral background.