Irving Penn at the MEP

PENN & FASHION

The exhibition unfolds chronologically, retracing Irving Penn’s career from 1947 to 2008. It begins in the 1950s, with the presentation of his legendary photographs of Parisian haute couture collections such as those of Dior and Balenciaga, brought to life by the era’s greatest models, including Lisa Fonssagrives and Jean Patchett. In the 1970s, the creations of Ungaro and Courrèges and the extravagant outfits worn by Marisa Berenson or Lauren Hutton caught the photographer’s eye, followed by those of Yves Saint Laurent and Karl Lagerfeld in the following decade.

The exhibition also presents Penn’s unprecedented collaboration with the Japanese designer Issey Miyake, whose sculptural garments perfectly complemented his minimalist photographic style.

Throughout the last three decades of his career, Penn maintained a consistent approach with an emphasis on the silhouette, volume, and texture. He captured in colour the sumptuous gowns designed by John Galliano and the opulent creations of Christian Lacroix, as well as Chanel’s spectacular feather headpieces, in breathtaking images.

Finally, his striking images for the beauty pages of Vogue magazine in the 1990s and 2000s bear witness to the creativity and modernity of an artist whose work has not yet been fully explored.

Always faithful to a demanding artistic vision, regardless of the context of the commission, Penn helped to bring art, fashion, and commerce together with unparalleled mastery. His work is characterised by an aesthetic of elegant simplicity. Each image is the result of a long process of reflection, culminating in timeless compositions created using sophisticated printing techniques, many of which have become icons in the history of photography.

The exhibition is drawn primarily from the collections of the MEP and that of Nicola Erni. Assembled over the last twenty-five years, the latter is now one of the most extensive and remarkable collections dedicated to fashion photography, covering the period from the 1930s to the present day.

The exhibition also benefits from numerous exceptional loans from The Irving Penn Foundation and the Miyake Issey Foundation.

Nanténé Traoré

Nanténé Traoré’s return to the Breton coast, a place he had visited as a child with his mother, brought traumatic memories back to the surface and marked the beginning of a period of profound depression and dissociation. Made using expired film stock dating from the 1990s, these images convey a state of disorientation in which reality seems to slip away. The film’s chemical alterations transform colours, blur contours and produce unstable, almost ghostly visions.

In this landscape shaped by memory, his walks become a way of redirecting his attention towards the surrounding world and the elements that compose it: shorelines, birds, stray dogs, and familiar sleeping figures. His gaze settles on the fragile beauty of beings and places destined to fade away.

In his studio, Gilbert constructs and photographs assemblages made from modest and ephemeral materials — paper cut-outs, draped fabrics, string and found objects — transforming them into anti-monumental sculptures and delicate, precisely crafted aerial constructions. Rooted in an almost childlike approach to making and play, these fragile forms appear to exist in a state of precarious balance.

His photographs reveal the intimacy of the studio, where natural light enhances the materials and transforms each composition into an enchanted scene, reminiscent of a secret garden. The exhibition brings together works with twilight atmospheres: paper castles, translucent curtains, unstable structures and erotic drawings, all bathed in the final rays of daylight filtering through the windows.