Irving Penn’s portraits of tradespeople

(From left) House painter, London, 1950; Rockette, New York, 1951; Chevrier, Paris, 1950; Vitrier, Paris, 1950: all from Irving Penn’s ‘Small Trades’ series

In the British edition of Vogue in February 1951 two lorry-washers are described (in the Vogue-speak of the time) as “rakishly capped” and as “picturesque as gondoliers”. They were photographed by Irving Penn and are now on view in London. The whiff of condescension in the original project has evaporated over the years.

Penn made about 250 large-format portraits of tradesmen in a burst of enthusiasm over the course of 1950 and 1951. He started the series in Paris and continued in London and New York. Astonishingly, one of the recruiters for the Parisian set was Robert Doisneau: the least Voguey photographer imaginable, but he knew just where to find picturesque exemplars of the small trades. Doisneau had made a portrait of Jacques Tati in 1949, alone in a studio but for the wreckage of his bicycle, which prefigures what Penn was to refine into one of his great series.

Making them was a contrast to Penn’s more regular tasks as a fashion photographer and as the portraitist of major cultural figures. Some were to be printed in Vogue, and some in a striking issue of Life magazine in 1951. Penn then included 90 of them in his book Moments Preserved (1960). He revisited them later when his dissatisfaction with the reproduced photograph on the printed page led him to rework most of the images in the different chemistry of the platinum print. In 2008, a year before the photographer’s death, the J Paul Getty Museum in California bought the whole set and in 2009 published a brilliant catalogue. The history of these pictures, from raw magazine “job” through various types of promotional republication, then to scholarly monograph and finally to vastly expensive artwork, is a classic trajectory for photographs. From throwaway to masterpiece in 60 years.

A selection of 30 of the “Small Trades” pictures are now on show at Hamiltons Gallery in London, following a larger exhibition at the Getty (and alongside the current retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery). They are certainly vastly expensive. Priced between $60,000 and $250,000, these are photographs which may break the million-dollar mark at auction before long. Made in tiny editions of a few prints of each, many of them already housed in national collections around the world, these are as blue-chip as anything on the photographic market: Penn was well advised in marketing his prints with control and care.

Photographed in great detail on a plain canvas background by natural light only, the pictures have a serial continuity which leaps out, although they were made in three separate studios. In each the subjects wear their work clothes, sometimes with one or two props of their trade. There are almost no seated figures, and very few women. Penn asked single sitters to stand alone, and photographed them at full length. They are not overtly political. They take their place in a long visual tradition of “petits métiers”, which goes back to the 18th-century Encyclopédie of Diderot and d’Alembert. The Enlightenment view that other people’s skills are interesting in themselves and worth attention whatever their social status is strongly present in these pictures. By taking ordinary people out of context and bathing them in his churchy light, Penn gave them an opportunity to be seen as great. Each is described by his trade, not by a name. Each is invited to represent more than just himself: his trade, but also his caste, his tribe.

Every detail becomes potentially meaningful. Take, for example, the matter of hats. In 1950, gentlemen went out in the street in a hat, and these sitters all (but one) wear hats, even in the studio. Where there is a hat of the trade – many different trades still used cap badges in the middle of the last century – the wearer makes it his own either by the rakish angles that Vogue’s sub-editors noticed on the lorry-washers, or by the idiosyncrasies of crush and dent. As viewers we scrutinise those hats for clues to the person, the class, the job. We’re made to look harder.

People didn’t wear hats just for fashion. In 1950, in England, rationing was still in force. People were ill-fed and ill-heated: French and English sitters look leaner, American ones better filled. Reading these details becomes irresistible, a kind of engagement that the pictures force upon us. Why did a New York news-vendor affect an ebony – or is it Bakelite? – cigarette-holder? And, by the way, the gob of ash at his feet gives a clue as to how long Penn asked him to hold the pose. There are sharp trouser creases on those in the hospitality industry, and thick splashes of clay on the road-workers. Among the European sitters, there are many patched and mended garments, far more (and the garments are far older) than we are used to seeing now. Textiles are beautifully rendered, with a tangible texture akin to the lovely rendering of chain mail in a brass rubbing of an old tomb.

If the details are the way into these marvellous pictures, the way out is grander. It’s impossible, when in front of them, to avoid thoughts of the dignity of human labour (or perhaps of exploitation) and impossible not to see in these single workers the network of relations which makes up a whole city.

Many photographers since Penn have made fine series of this kind, notably the Englishman Steve Pyke. But this is the mother lode. For those who didn’t see these photographs exhibited at the Getty, here is another chance. Lucky indeed are those who can afford to own one.

‘Irving Penn: Small Trades’, Hamiltons Gallery, London W1, until April 24. www.hamiltonsgallery.com