Published in 2010, Irving Penn Portraits isolates one sustained strand of Irving Penn’s seven-decade career: his encounters with notable figures before the camera. Thirty photographs extend from his work of the 1940s into the twenty-first century, forming a concise, career-spanning account of his contribution to photographic portraiture rather than a general retrospective.

The subjects come from several fields of twentieth-century culture. Giorgio de Chirico, Igor Stravinsky, Pablo Picasso and Duke Ellington appear alongside Marlene Dietrich, Rudolf Nureyev, Jasper Johns, Woody Allen and photographer Helmut Newton. Seen within a single volume, these individuals are more than a roster of celebrated names. Their differing public identities allow the reader to consider a central problem of the genre: how much a photographic sitting can disclose, and how much necessarily remains beyond the image.

A curator’s essay by Magdalene Keaney provides a framework for this concentrated selection. Identified as the first book devoted exclusively to Penn’s portraiture, the publication treats that practice as a subject in its own right. Its thirty-image scope encourages close comparison across decades, tracing continuity and change without attempting to summarize every aspect of Penn’s work.

Issued by Harry N. Abrams as an 80-page hardcover, the book is modest in scale but sharply defined in purpose. For a collector, its importance lies not in claims of scarcity or comprehensiveness, but in the clarity of its editorial premise: a bounded survey of portraiture across nearly the full arc of Penn’s working life. It offers a useful point of entry for readers approaching Penn, and a focused complement to broader monographs for those already familiar with his photography.