Skull shots: When Irving Penn peeled away the skin

(Image: The Irving Penn Foundation, courtesy Hamiltons Gallery, London)

WHEN I was a kid I found a roe deer's head, still partially covered in flesh and fur. I wasn't allowed to keep it, so this image ? simple, clean, hygienic ? is the next best thing. (I wanted the skull as much for its resemblance to Judge Mortis ? an evil character in British comic 2000 AD ? as I did out of any biological interest.)

The picture was taken in 1986 by legendary American photographer Irving Penn as part of his study of skulls from the collection at the National Museum in Prague, Czech Republic. Penn, who died in 2009 aged 92, rarely spoke about his work. But in a 1989 catalogue accompanying his skull study exhibition Cranium Architecture, Penn said: "An exquisite edifice of living machine. Hard chambers of bone to guard soft organs, protected conduits and channels."

The images, which include skulls from a warthog, gorilla, giraffe and dog, among others, are now on display at Hamiltons Gallery in London.

"They are direct descendants of the physiognomic tradition," says photography critic Francis Hodgson of Penn's skulls. "They seem to search for real truths of character in the act of peeling away the skin."

For me the roe deer, with its molary grin and stubby horns, will forever evoke the supernatural. The hippo skull, meanwhile, with its tiny brain case and tilted aspect, somehow suggests gentleness. Odd for an animal that kills more humans than any other animal in Africa does.

This article appeared in print under the headline "Peeling away the skin"

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