About Penzlien

To live and work in New York is the dream of many German creative artists aged between 20 and 30, because the course of the world of fashion photography is largely set there.

Isabel Asha Penzlien followed her dream at the tender age of 19, and has settled in Manhattan. A New Yorker by choice, she has succeeded at preserving a bit of German identity in America’s capital city of creativity. Thus, she sometimes shows her models reading a German newspaper or drinking German beer in her photos.

Penzlien mainly photographs for the London scene-magazine i-D. And whether she is dealing with hot new designers or artists from the scene, her portraits always maintain a cool and differentiating distance that permits her material to become excellent milieu photography. Penzlien has an acute sense of beauty in intimate moments, and always sets her models according to their mood. Whether they feel like making faces, or prefer to be introverted and quiet instead – the photographer adapts herself to them. The issue is never the picture that must be made, but rather that her camera begins to communicate with the person. Calm, but powerful pictorial worlds arise this way. In Germany she presents her carefully thought out fashion photos in the magazine Achtung.