Almost 450 photographs in a single room, hung like a vast mosaic. With The World According to Penn, the Bourse de Commerce in Paris devotes Gallery 2 to Irving Penn, drawing on the extensive holding of the American photographer's work in the Pinault Collection. The installation, on view until 10 January 2027, is part of Remember Me, the major exhibition that from 7 October fills the entire building to celebrate two hundred years of photography with some 700 works by more than 70 artists. Born in 1917 and died in 2009, Penn is one of the central figures of 20th-century American photography. For more than sixty years he worked for Vogue, reinventing fashion and portrait photography with a sober, direct and timeless style. He was above all a studio photographer: a simple canvas or white paper backdrop and natural light were enough for him to isolate his subjects from their context and heighten their physical presence. An essential method that he applied with the same care to stars, models, tradespeople, faded flowers and cigarette butts. The installation, curated by Matthieu Humery, photography advisor to the Pinault Collection, with Lola Regard, dispenses with both chronological and thematic order. Portraits of famous figures, fashion images, ethnographic reportage, nudes, still lifes and floral compositions engage in free dialogue, from the 1940s to the early 2000s. The celebrated Corner Portraits, in which leading figures of postwar culture pose squeezed into the angle between two walls, hang alongside the Small Trades, portraits of street workers, fashion shots and the series devoted to discarded objects. Among the works is also the famous image of the Cuzco children, shown in three different printing techniques. The result is an immersion in the artist's mind that highlights the constants of his work: rigorous composition, care for materials and printing, and the ability to capture human presence and beauty even in the simplest forms.
