Some of Irving Penn’s finest work.

Irving Penn is not just a great fashion photographer. Give him some spare time and off he goes on some personal project or other, frequently to the remotest places on earth, or the strangest. Like San Francisco.

This fine paperback shows pictures taken in his portable studio across the world, always by northern light. Published in 1974, it goes much further than August Sander’s cold, soulless work. Penn is vitally involved with, and sensitive to, his subjects, be they the mud people of New Guinea or Crete’s wizened old women.

If there are favorites then one has to be the group shot of Hell’s Angels with their women and machines, their leader looking like nothing so much as a Greek god. Then there are the Moroccan women so shrouded that only an eye protrudes.

I have been coming back to this book for some thirty years now and it never ceases to stimulate the senses and please the eye.