The name Irving Penn will forever be associated with Vogue magazine. From 1943, the American artist became a specialist in fashion photography, immortalising the world’s most famous models.

His work centred on the man in the street in the 1950s is less well known. This is the theme of the retrospective organised in the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson from 5th May to 25th July 2010. The “Petits Métiers” exhibition gathers together around a hundred prints of impoverished men and women workers. Some are being shown for the first time in Paris. Yet it was in this city that in 1951 Irving Penn started this series of work, before continuing in London and New York over the following years.

The artist’s aim was to show the world an unknown and ever-changing milieu, that of the city’s working men and women. He took inspiration from the series by Eugène Atget, the French photographer who immortalised the misery of the capital’s streets with their stone-cutters, dog groomers and shoe lace sellers. And also from Germany’s August Sander, the Weimar Republic’s most famous photographer.

Of course, all were studio photographs, just like Irving Penn’s works. The purposely dramatic lighting used stresses the precarious situation of these men and women, whose survival seems to hang by a thread. Thanks to numerous loans by the Los Angeles Getty Centre, the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson pays a touching homage to the photographer who died in 2009, far from the catwalks, stars and still life which made him so famous.