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While in college I had an opportunity to work with palladium as a photographic printing medium. More than anything, it was an educational experience; I was never very happy with the images I produced. I like the tones which can be produced by both platinum printing and palladium, but I had never thought of either method of printing having any differing qualities from other photographic methods outside of the tone created. After reading about Irving Penn’s work I began to think I had missed some of the qualities of the mediums. I took what I had read to be accurate, and believed he had developed a combination of platinum and palladium which resulted in an increased tonal range with pure blacks, which could not be reproduced in any other photographic method. This idea makes it essential that his works be viewed in person, otherwise there is no way to appreciate the range of tones in his prints. When I had the opportunity to go to the exhibit at the National Gallery, I was obviously excited about getting to see some of his prints in person.

Note: the images accompanying this post were collected from various websites, and do not all reflect platinum and palladium version on display at the National Gallery. Unfortunately, my request to reproduce their press images was ignored.

I think of myself as having a fairly discerning eye when it comes to subtle tonal and color variation (in a large part due to the color matching demands of my work). In terms of tonal range and detail I could not see a significant difference between his platinum and palladium prints, and a contact printed large format negative on fiber based paper. I have seen some smaller format work printed on variable contrast fiber paper with a split filter method that came pretty close too. All in all, I have reverted back to my previous opinions of the process, good tone, decent tonal range, but I’m probably not going to make the heavy metal investment any time in the near future myself.

With all of the process stuff out of the way the only thing left is the absolutely beautiful images Penn created. From his Cuzco children to still lifes of cigarette butts, he was able to find and create amazing works of art.
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Penn rented a studio of a local photographer to create many of his studio photos of indigenous people. I think that he was reacting against established ideas, and at the same time isolating the subject in such a way as to focus the viewer, by placing them in a studio setting.

This idea of focusing the viewer on the subject and not the setting seems to echo in many of the photos he took in his “corner set.”
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About the background visible in the above photo Irving Penn said:

Sometime in 1948 I began photographing portraits in a small corner space made of two studio flats pushed together. A very rich series of pictures resulted.

This confinement, surprisingly, seemed to comfort people, soothing them. The walls were a surface to lean on or push against. For me the picture possibilities were interesting; limiting the subjects’ movement seemed to relieve me of part of the problem of holding on to them.

Penn’s desire to perfect his blend of palladium and platinum was born out of dissatisfaction with magazine reproductions of his images. He worked extensively as a fashion photographer, many times utilizing his wife as a model (she is considered by some to be the first supermodel).
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Penn’s quality work earned him the recognition needed to photograph some of the most famous of the 20th century, making any retrospective view of his work seem astounding for the people alone, if not for the beauty of the images.
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Rather than rehashing what National Gallery had to say about the show and Penn’s history I have quoted and included it below.

National Gallery Provides the following biography:

Irving Penn
American, born 1917

Irving Penn was born in 1917 in Plainfield, New Jersey. In 1934 he enrolled at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art, where he studied design with Alexey Brodovitch.

In 1938 he began a career in New York as a graphic artist. Then, after a year painting in Mexico, he returned to New York City and began work at Vogue magazine, where Alexander Liberman was art director.

Liberman encouraged Penn to take his first color photograph, a still life that became the 1 October 1943 cover of Vogue, beginning a fruitful collaboration with the magazine that continues to this day. In addition to his editorial and fashion work for Vogue, Penn has photographed for other magazines and for a number of commercial clients in America and around the world.

He has published nine books of photographs: Moments Preserved (1960); Worlds in a Small Room (1974); Inventive Paris Clothes (1977); Flowers (1980); Passage (1991); Irving Penn Regards The Work of Issey Miyake (1999); Still Life (2001); Earthly Bodies (2002); A Notebook at Random (2004); and two books of drawings.

Penn’s photographs are in the collections of major museums in America and throughout the world, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Moderna Museet in Stockholm, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which honored him with a retrospective exhibition in 1984. That exhibition was circulated to museums in twelve countries. In 1997, Penn made a major donation of prints and archival material to the Art Institute of Chicago. He made his gift of the Platinum Test Materials collages and 85 corresponding prints as well as archival material to the National Gallery of Art in 2002 and 2003.

Irving Penn lives and works in New York City.

National Gallery’s press release about the Irving Penn exhibit:

IRVING PENN AND THE PLATINUM PRINTING PROCESS

A meticulous craftsman, Irving Penn has experimented extensively with platinum/palladium printing since the early 1960s, transforming his celebrated photographs into independent works of art with remarkably subtle, rich tonal ranges and luxurious textures.

Prized for its rich, subtle tonal range and its wealth of fine detail, platinum was a popular method of making photographic prints at the turn of the 20th century. Photographers such as Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Frederick Evans employed it extensively. With platinum, chemicals could be applied with a brush, allowing greater freedom of expression. Also, the light sensitive salts were absorbed into the paper fibers, giving the print a sensuous texture dramatically different from the glossy surface of gelatin silver prints. As the cost of platinum escalated during World War I, manufacturers stopped making platinum paper. A few continued to make platinum paper by hand, but the process had long since been forgotten by the time Penn embraced it in the early 1960s.

In the early 1960s, disillusioned with the way his photographs appeared in publications, Penn embarked on a multiyear research project to learn more about the long-forgotten technique of platinum printing. He conducted his initial research in the New York Public Library, scouring old journals for recipes and techniques on the platinum process. His first results were less than satisfactory. As he looked at the first platinum print he had ever made, he realized that he needed to coat, expose, and develop his print multiple times in order to achieve the richness and complexity he desired. He would also have to ensure that his negative was in perfect registration and that the paper did not change size during its repeated submersions in chemicals. He overcame considerable technical challenges to do so, at one point even working with DuPont on a new polymer that would affix paper to an aluminum support.

Penn worked in his darkroom on Long Island on the weekends, often late into the night, devoting several years to his experiments with various printing techniques. He tried many different chemicals, including palladium, iridium, and gum bichromate, mixed with both black and colored pigments. Platinum, he discovered, produced a lavish tonal image and rich blacks but, used alone, could be coarse, while palladium gave delicate tones but lacked true blacks. After many trials, he realized that when platinum and palladium were mixed together in the correct proportions and coated onto the paper multiple times they could create luminous prints.

Penn experimented not only with multiple coatings and different formulas, but also with different exposure times, developing solutions, and various papers. He spent several years perfecting his technique and did not make prints he found acceptable until 1967.

Penn mixed, coated, exposed, and developed all the platinum prints himself. After spending years as a commercial photographer who made negatives but sometimes did not see his results until they were printed in a magazine, he delighted in his newfound ability to make a photograph from start to finish. He went back to earlier photographs and sought to transform them from a thing suitable for reproduction into something beautiful in and of itself. Starting in the 1970s, he also applied the platinum process to new photographs.