Irving Penn. 3 Chanel Products, New York.

A commission, a backdrop

Irving Penn was born in 1917 and died in 2009. He was one of the American photographers who worked longest for magazines and for advertising. Fashion, portraits and still life ran side by side through his whole career.

In 1968, in New York, Penn photographed three Chanel products. The Art Institute of Chicago, which holds the print today, files it under advertising, still life and cosmetics. No model. No hand lifting anything. Only objects.

The title is just as plain. 3 Chanel Products, New York. The back of the print repeats that line in a box, with the year 1968 in brackets. Penn named his picture the way a clerk keeps a ledger: how many, whose, where.

He did the same with many other still lifes. His titles tend to name exactly what lies in front of the lens, then add the city. No adjectives. Four years later he photographed cigarette ends picked up from the street, and titled them with a number too: Cigarette No. 17, New York.

From advertisement to silver print

An advertising photograph usually lives a short life. It is printed on a page, turned past, and replaced the next season. Penn kept his negatives, and years later he went back to print them himself in the darkroom.

The Chicago print of 3 Chanel Products was made in 1992. It is a small gelatin silver print, about 22.6 by 19.9 cm. The back carries a crowd of stamps and notes: Penn's signature, the stamp PHOTOGRAPH BY IRVING PENN, the year of printing, and a stamp saying the print was toned in selenium, a process that deepens the blacks and helps a silver print last.

Another line states that signed silver prints of this negative will not exceed seven. An image once made to be reproduced endlessly on magazine paper is now limited and counted, like an etching.

Penn gave the print to the Art Institute in 1996. A year later it appeared in the catalogue and retrospective Irving Penn: A Career in Photography, which opened in Chicago in November 1997 and travelled to the State Hermitage in St. Petersburg, then Hamburg, Munich, San Francisco, Houston and Paris. In 2009, the year Penn died, Chicago showed it again in Irving Penn: A Tribute.

Photographing what cannot be seen

Scent is the hardest thing to photograph. A camera records only the light that bounces off a surface. For a perfume house this is an old problem: how do you sell something no one can see, on a page no one can smell?

Many advertisements answer with a story. A woman, a room, an evening. The viewer is invited into a life, and the scent is the ticket. Penn's still lifes of this kind go the other way. He removes the story and leaves the object.

When an object stands alone, the eye turns to small things: an outline, a shine, the letters on a label, a shadow on the surface. Black and white removes even colour. What remains is form and light, and that restraint makes the object seem heavier, more real.

Perhaps that is why a sales picture could enter a museum without changing anything. Penn added nothing. He looked closely, then printed with care.

Someone standing before the print today, in a gallery that smells of nothing, can still remember. Not because the image evokes, but because the objects in it were real, the kind that sat on dressing tables of many people, in many places.