In total, Mr. Penn editioned 42 different images of flowers throughout his lifetime. All 42 were exhibited for the first and so far only time in 2015 at Hamiltons Gallery, at which point Hamiltons and The Irving Penn Foundation published a catalogue raisonné of the series as well. In 1967, art director Alexander Liberman commissioned Irving Penn to lens a still life series of flowers for the December edition of American Vogue. Using his signature compositional clarity, the influential image-maker eschewed the sentimentality so commonly associated with blooms, for a stark focus on structure, texture, palette and anatomical function.

It was from de Chirico’s metaphysical paintings that I learned how intrinsic to its character is an object’s situation. It was from him, too, that I knew how the tensions produced by any displacement of that object could be productively used in making a picture. The object of human love is never an organ, but the person who has the organ. Thus the attribution of the corolla to love can easily be explained: if the sign of love is displaced from the pistil and stamens to the surrounding petals, it is because the human mind is accustomed to making such a displacement with regard to people . . . Moreover, even the most beautiful flowers are spoiled in their centers by hairy sexual organs. Thus the interior of a rose does not at all correspond to its exterior beauty; if one tears off all the corolla’s petals, all that remains is a rather sordid tuft.[iii] In this respect, Irving Penn is a hero to us, standing tall in the already crowded field of artists who have taken inspiration from flowers over the years. Originally commissioned to shoot still life flowers for a 1967 issue of U.S Vogue by Alexander Liberman, new images in the series appeared in numerous editions over the years, culminating in the book, Flowers (1980). The images are a revelation, as resonant today as they must have been upon initial publication.Image: Irving Penn, Iceland Poppy, Papaver Nudicaule (B), New York, 2006. Courtesy the Irving Penn Foundation This effect has partly to do with his technique but it’s also something that flowers embody for us, the complicated place they occupy in our culture and economy. The job of the flower is to attract, but biologically speaking, however much we like flowers, cultivate them, and offer them to each other as tokens, we are not the target of that attraction. Human appreciation is entirely secondary. Flowers are utterly indifferent to us. They don’t care. But we are far from indifferent to them and they play upon all our desire and caprice. Each flower was entirely individual, and when two or more appeared in the same photograph they only served to heighten one another’s particulars. Penn was not looking for examples that were representative of their species, nor compiling a botanical guidebook or taxonomy. Each photograph is a unique encounter with a unique thing in all its unsettling wonder. At times the flowers appear prim and demure, their petals displaying themselves while covering their inner organs. But as Anthony West reminds us, where there is a flower there is sexual reproduction. And so Penn must to go beyond that coy fan dance, beyond the veil. Some of his strongest pictures confront the inner workings of the flower. Beyond the surface beauty lies an other-worldly fascination, where ugliness and allure will not be separated. The year he published Nadja, André Breton’s contemporary Georges Bataille wrote a short essay titled ‘The Language of Flowers’. At stake was the uncanny parallel between mankind and flowers in matters of attraction: The fact that we have turned flowers into symbols of so much—from joy and celebration to mourning and melancholia—should be enough to tell us they can never be reduced to the meanings a culture or a photographer may try to impose. Flowers, like photographs, have effects that overflow the language with which we battle in vain to contain them. Our physiological response to form and colour can never be entirely channeled into a psychological response (clear meaning, language, understandable emotions). There is always excess, an energy that won’t be harnessed or put to work. However tended and cultivated a flower might be, it remains wild.

A big part of the reason that Floom exists is as an attempt to tear flowers away from the trite sentimentality they’re often cloaked in. Prettified and Disney-fied, so many bouquets trade in the raw natural splendour of a stem in exchange for homogenous shades of pink tied to cloying ‘symbolism.’ Irving Penn’s Flowers’ is an essay by David Campany written for the book Irving Penn: Flowers, published by Hamilton’s Gallery, London in collaboration with the Irving Penn Foundation, 2015 One of the defining qualities of the photographic medium is its glassy, unblinking stare. I think Penn intuited this. He knew that whatever the pictorial and iconographic affinities photography might have with painting, the differences between the mediums were profound. When we look at those droplets of moisture in a still life by Caravaggio or Cotán we know we are contemplating paint. But a droplet in a Penn flower photo? Where is it, exactly? What is it? The photograph has no surface to catch the eye, and so it falls through the image, and onto what? A real flower? Its ideal stand-in? It is a mirage, a fantasy of an absent object. Penn’s photographs can be so lucid, so crystalline they are almost hallucinatory. Dreamlike. Here we have every flower photograph made by Irving Penn that was ever printed as an edition. A catalogue raisonné of sustained image-making and botanical curiosity. It forms a slice through the second half of his career. His consistency was famously unnerving. Penn came to artistic maturity relatively young and managed to sustain his exacting standards for decades. This is unusual. Much of the medium’s art history is the work of photographers who hit a ‘hot streak’ (as John Szarkowski once put it) that often lasted no more than a few years. Penn began to photograph flowers seriously in 1967. By then he had already accrued nearly thirty years’ experience behind the camera. He was ready for the challenge of extreme simplicity that flowers demand. For the next seven years he photographed a different variety for each December issue of Vogue. Thereafter he returned to the subject right up to the end. A Penn flower from the 1960s and a Penn flower from the 2000s can be almost indistinguishable. Like the still-life painters Chardin and Morandi, this was an artist who circled around his cherished motifs, finding worlds in simple forms.

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