A Preview of Irving Penn’s Magnificent Career Retrospective at the Met

When shooting his first celebrity portraits, in the 1940s, Irving Penn put Salvador Dalí, Georgia O’Keeffe, and others in a tight corner, literally, by positioning them at the center of two angled screens in his studio. “He liked what happened psychologically to each person when they entered his space,” says Jeff Rosenheim, a co-curator of “Irving Penn: ­Centennial,” a sweeping survey devoted to the late photographer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, opening Thursday (through July 30). “His corner portraits push the personality of the subject forward.” On view will be more than six decades’ worth of Penn’s boldly economical fashion photographs, fleshy nudes, and portraits of the Quechua people, along with his monumental still lifes—all shot in his minimal setups. Adds Rosenheim, “Rather than hide the language of the studio, Penn wanted the viewer to see the artifice of it.”