Visiting the exhibition I discovered that Irving Penn was originally a street photographer. However, upon working for Vogue and meeting his wife, his pictures were of human subjects. He had many powerful pictures ranging from famous people in New York City at the time to the people of Peru and to the women of New Guinea.

What interested me the most was the fact that despite the numerous photographs of the human being, Penn had a very strong love for still life. He felt that the objects he captured left the essence of the human. A whole section of the exhibition was dedicated to the photos of the burning of 2 cigarettes. It was so fascinating to me that each photo represented each stage of the life of these cigarettes. I don’t know why but this part of the exhibition really spoke to me. To be able to compare each picture or be able to skip from the beginning to the end was something I never saw in photography. I decided to take a picture of the last stage of the burning cigarettes because I like how you wouldn’t be able to tell what it was unless you looked at the other stages. And the use of 4 parts of the picture to make one big picture.