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 print of Cuzco Children sold for $361,000 in 2007. In dollar value, the Penn Foundation's gift must rival any received by the Getty's photography department.

The Getty had just a handful of Penn photos until 2008, when it acquired 252 prints from the Small Trades series in a purchase/donation deal with the artist. Then-Getty curator Weston Naef explained: "We like to focus on whole bodies of work. We're seeing these pictures as if they're Monet's waterlilies, a single coherent body of work."

Irving Penn, Ballroom Dancing Instructors (from Small Trades), 1951 (negative) and 1967 (platinum-palladium print). Getty Museum, partial gift of Irving Penn. (c) The Irving Penn Foundation