Posed and poised: the portraits of Irving Penn

"In portrait photography there is something more profound we seek inside a person, while being painfully aware that a limitation of our medium is that the inside is recordable only so far as it is apparent on the outside".

Irving Penn understood the limits of photographic portraiture, which is one of the key reasons why he was so brilliant at it. At the National Portrait Gallery, in a beautifully arranged show called simply Portraits, one can trace the trajectory of a style that is as instantly recognisable as any in photography. The elements of that style are familiar now, but were radical when Penn began photographing the great and the good in the mid 1940s: the starkness of the setting, the low-key lighting, the subtle choreography of pose and gesture that both hints at the interior life of the subject. Penn's studio was empty of everything but the basics, and almost downbeat in its ambience: grey walls, grey fabric for the backdrop, a grey floor that he seldom swept (so much so that one sitter objected, and left without being photographed). The setting must surely have disconcerted those more suited to ostentation and comfort, just as Penn's legendary charm – a kind of polite matter-of-factness – helped reassure them that all was well.

Penn's portraits often manage to be both austere and playful. Alfred Hitchcock, sitting in profile on a mound of grey carpet, looks both plump enough to burst out of his suit and absurdly dainty. Truman Capote, like many of Penn's sitters, looks like he has been backed into a corner by the camera, and seems to be shrinking even further into the folds of his overcoat. Capote is kneeling on a chair and the ragged edge of the plasterboard wall he leans against runs the entire length of the photograph. Penn's portrait of Cecil Beaton, one of many fellow photographers who sat for him, is ornate to the point of surreal, drawing one's gaze away from the subject to the nude in the background, then the large, ungainly camera. Penn's portraits are almost postmodern in the way in which they draw attention to the artifice that informs them. His studio was, in one way, the great leveller.

In the 1950s, based for a time in Paris, Penn photographed tradespeople in their working garb in between fashion shoots for Vogue. That series, Small Trades, recently exhibited at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, is the perfect counterpoint to the current London show. Both speak volumes about the trust Penn instilled in his subjects, and how that trust underpinned the collaborative process that is nearly always necessary for a successful portrait.

As both a portraitist and a jobbing fashion photographer, Penn was prolific. In 1948, he completed more than 100 studio sittings in between several extended editorials for Vogue. Around this time, his portraits begin to change, both through necessity and his own need for creative reinvention. As he travelled in Europe, he started to use daylight more, describing it in sensual terms as "the most delicious of several kinds of light". The settings remained simple, more often than not an available wall, but the props disappeared altogether and slowly the subject began to fill the frame.

His head-and-shoulders shot of Alberto Giacometti, taken in 1950, is a pivotal one, even though the tone remains austere to the point of ascetic. As the decade progressed, though, Penn began to home in on the face alone – its landscape of lines, creases and shadows. Picasso, inscrutable as always, directs one beady eye back at the lens from beneath a felt hat as if daring Penn to come any closer. Saul Bellow responds to the camera's proximity with a look that is both quizzical and relaxed, his chin resting on his hand. One's gaze is drawn to the telling details: the wisps of thinning hair that fall over Bellow's furrowed forehead; the tufts of hair on his fingers, the parched lower lip. How much, though, are we really seeing of him? The answer might be, just enough to suggest the interior life that even a portraitist as brilliant as Penn can only hint at.

More intriguingly, how much are we seeing of Irving Penn? He is present here too in every gesture and pose, in every shadow and texture, in the revealing glance of light against skin. It is worth remembering that Penn was a brilliant technician, constantly experimenting not just with form, but with the chemical process of printing. His early silver gelatin prints are both darker and starker. They match the austerity of his vision. In the 60s he shifted to the older method of platinum printing and began using handmade paper. His vision softened and deepened. The images, once almost painterly, now revealed more detail, from the weave of suit fabric to the arrangement of hair on a raised eyebrow.

Penn once said that "sensitive people faced with the prospect of a camera portrait put on a face they think is the one they would like to show to the world … Every often what lies behind the facade is rare and more wonderful than the subject knows or dares to believe." But what strikes me most about Penn's portraits is, in fact, how little they reveal of the elusive inner life that lies behind the facade. As a fashion photographer, he learned how to choreograph a shoot; as a portraitist, he was a brilliant choreographer of individuals. Even his tradespeople are posed and poised, made to fulfil – or complete – Penn's vision of them. He bestows on them a kind of heightened ordinariness. Likewise, the great and the good are somehow democratised by his camera, by the inspired functionality of the settings in which he places them, one by one, as if he is somehow already thinking of the exhibition that will one day result. More than anything, it is the quiet cumulative power of these portraits that stays with you, the sense of an artistic signature, an imprint that is as rich in its import as it is minimal in its style.

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