Penson was born into a poor bookbinder's
Jewish family in 1893 in the small town of
Velizh in
Vitebsk Governorate (present-day
Smolensk Oblast, Russia). He soon moved to
Vilno where he enrolled in the art school of S. N. Yuzhanin. In 1914, he was forced as a Jew to move with his family to
Kokand in
Turkestan. After the
1917 Russian Revolution he founded an art school in Kokand under administration of the Kokand Revolutionary Committee. He became the director and taught draftsmanship to 350 Uzbek children studying at the school. In 1921 his life changed dramatically when he obtained a camera. He would go on to become one of Uzbekistan's and indeed the Soviet Union's prominent professional photographers in the period 1920–1940, capturing its people and economic progression and made over 30,000 photographs by 1940. He moved to the Uzbek capital of
Tashkent and from 1926 through to 1949 worked for the largest newspaper in Central Asia, the
Pravda Vostoka (Truth of the East). During the 1930s he was particularly prolific in capturing the public engineering works in Uzbekistan and the industrialization of the cotton trade in the country. Penson's images were widely circulated by the Soviet news agency
TASS and in 1933 his photographs featured in an extensive volume exploring economic progression in the Soviet Union entitled,
USSR: Under Construction. In 1940 Penson met
Sergei Eisenstein who said of him: ==Personal life==