Cigarette no. 69, New York, 1972

Cigarettes is among the most defining oeuvres in Irving Penn’s extraordinary approach to still-life imagery. Picked from the streets of New York City, Penn’s subjects transcend the thoughtlessly discarded into a realm of conceptual significant, appearing as organic and monumental sculptures. The Cigarettes series also encapsulates Penn’s shift from nearly three decades of predominately editorial fashion work to more personal projects, especially with his focus here on platinum-palladium paper printing, a challenging, but exceptionally rewarding medium through which Penn brings forth astounding detail and texture in each Cigarettes photograph. Cigarettes was first exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in 1975.