Irving Penn "Cuzco" to Getty
Irving Penn, Cuzco Children , 1948 (negative) and 1978 (platinum-palladium print). Getty Museum, gift of Irving Penn Foundation, made possible by an anonymous donor. (c) Condé Nast The Irving Penn Foundation has donated 189 photographs from the Vogue photographer's Cuzco project to the Getty Museum. The negatives were created in three days during a 1948 trip to Peru. Penn rented the studio of a local photographer specializing in portraits of rural families taken during Christmas shopping expeditions. The customers showed up to find Penn in place of the usual photographer. They wear a variety of ordinary and special clothes and stand, sometimes barefoot, on the 19th-century studio's tile floor. Penn printed the images in gelatin silver and platinum for decades thereafter. The Cuzco project set the template for similar series taken in cities around the globe. Though Penn was prolific and worked in large editions, his work commands high prices. A platinum-palladium pri...
