Irving Penn at de Young Museum

Published August 8, 2024

Contributed by Kilotype

de Young onsite signage

Irving Penn is widely recognized as one of the 20th century’s greatest photographers. Vogue’s longest-standing contributor, Penn revolutionized fashion photography in the postwar era. The retrospective at the de Young Museum San Francisco traces his 70-year spanning career in 175 photographs—from early documentary scenes chronicling the Summer of Love to celebrity portraits, abstract nudes, and fashion studies.

The graphic identity and typographic concept were developed by Lizzie Baur and uses a custom unreleased variable version of Charlottenburg, which was created for the exhibition. A major through-line centers on theatricality and artifice. For the existential portrait series, Penn made a banal, temporary set in which he stuffed his subjects into a corner crevice, challenging them to grapple with physically occupying such an unusual space. Their bodies became almost sculptural as his sitters contort and utilize the space in radically different ways. To rearticulate the gesture typographically, Lizzie Baur imagined their bodies as letterforms. The width of the characters can be manually scaled, just like the portrayed adapt to their unfamiliar surroundings.

The variable font is also employed in motion graphics, which nicely contrasts with the all-analog title wall leading to the exhibition. The wall was painted by hand by the San Francisco-based sign painting studio New Bohemia Signs and took over three days to complete.

ITC Garamond supports the expressive typography and large-scale display arrangements in the more toned-down, classical communication elements.

More images and additional information can be found on Lizzie Baur’s website.