Fashion photographer Irving Penn remembered

Irving Penn, one of America's and the world's most celebrated and influential photographers of the twentieth century, passed away this week aged 92 at his home in Manhattan. Most famous for his fashion photographs and portraits of prominent cultural figures, Penn's prolific body of work also included studies of ordinary people, still lives and nudes.

In 1943, Penn started contributing to Vogue magazine and became one of the first commercial photographers to cross the chasm that separated commercial and art photography. He did so in part by using the same technique no matter what he photographed -- isolating his subject, allowing for scarcely a prop and building a work of graphic perfection through his printing process.

Critics considered the results to be icons, not just images, each one greater than the person or object in the frame. "His approach was never obvious," Phyllis Posnick, who collaborated with Penn at Vogue, told The Times on Wednesday. "He would make us go further and dig deeper and look beyond the obvious solution to a photograph to find something that was unique.

His most familiar photographs are the cosmetics ads he shot for Clinique that have appeared in magazines since 1968. Each image is a balancing act of face-cream jars, astringent bottles and bars of soap that threatens to collapse. He photographed them at close range to suggest the monumental scale of Pop art soup cans. Besides Clinique, Penn also photographed ads for Chanel and for Japanese fashion designer Issey Miyake for some years.

A pre-scheduled exhibition of Penn's photographs will open at The National Portrait Gallery in London on 18 February 2010 (until 31 May 2010) and will the first UK show of his work in twenty years.

Image: by Penn