Irving Penn at the Bourse de Commerce, from fashion to portraits

At the Bourse de Commerce, the exhibition brings together images that show how widely Irving Penn worked while keeping a strong sense of composition. Fashion photographs sit alongside still lifes and portraits of both anonymous sitters and celebrities, letting visitors follow a photographer equally attentive to surfaces and faces.

For artists and for anyone interested in drawing or painting, the appeal lies in the way he builds an image through precision, giving weight to form, texture and light. Even across very different subjects, Penn seems to look for what makes a presence hold together within the frame, whether it is an object, a garment or a face.

Showing nearly 450 works from the Pinault Collection also makes it possible to grasp the range of a body of work that is often reduced to a few famous pictures. Here, the full span matters: it reveals a sensitive universe in which photography becomes a disciplined yet inventive way of observing the real.