The unknown and the famous

In 1950, Irving Penn, working for Vogue in Paris, set himself up in a glass-roofed attic and, between fashion assignments, began a series of full-length portraits of tradesmen, inspired by the street portraits of Eugène Atget 50 years before. Later that year he continued the project in a painter’s studio in Chelsea.

Penn found that the working people of London responded to his invitation to be photographed differently from those in Paris. ‘In general, the Parisians doubted that we were doing exactly what we said we were doing. They felt there was something fishy going on, but they came to the studio more or less as directed — for the fee involved,’ he remembered. ‘But the Londoners were quite different from the French. It seemed to them the most logical thing in the world to be recorded in their work clothes.’

Penn took the photographs by natural light against the undifferentiated background of an old theatre curtain. He expanded his series in New York in 1951. The pictures were intended for magazine reproduction, but from the 1960s onwards he experimented with making them into platinum prints. Before his death last month, Virginia Heckert and Anne Lacoste edited a collection of 250 tritone plates from his series, under the title Small Trades (Getty Publications, £34.99).

These are portraits of unknown men and women, their humanity expressed through the props of their trade and through the expressions, wry, challenging or correct, that they present to the camera. A London lorry-washer in beret and waders holds his long-poled brush aloft like Don Quixote’s lance. A scarcely credible Paris contortionist, his head tucked so far through his legs that he looks up to the sky, retains his hat undisturbed on his head. These images, in their calm, clear concentration, present monochrome photography at its purest.