By PDN staff

Irving Penn, the influential, versatile and indefatigable studio photographer, died Wednesday at 92.

A craftsman and a perfectionist, Penn was known for longtime association with Vogue magazine. He shot pioneering fashion photographs in the 1950s and constructed elegant portraits of many important artists of the 20th century. Equally admired for his still life work, he was still producing work into his 90s.

Penn died at his home in Manhattan, according to Peter MacGill of the Pace/MacGill Gallery, which represents Penn’s work.

Sarah Greenough, senior curator of photographs at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., credits Penn with introducing a radically new look to fashion photography by isolating models against a plain background. "He completely changed the course of fashion photography after World War II," Greenough says. And he didn't stop with fashion. "He continued that restless experimentation throughout his career," Greenough adds.

Greenough worked with Penn on an exhibition earlier this decade and says he was "amazingly kind and generous." "He was, I think as you can see in his photographs, an extraordinary gentleman in everything he did," Greenough says.

“The thing about Mr. Penn first of all was the breadth of subjects he took on: He did portraits, still life, fashion,” says Anne Wilkes Tucker, curator of photography at Museum of Fine Arts Houston, who organized two Penn shows at the museum in 2002 and 2004. “And then there was the staying power of those images.”

Penn's work continues to inspire contemporary photographers. “I think he was influential on every photographer of my generation,” says advertising and still life photographer Mark Laita.

The look that photographers now associate with Penn—objects isolated against a neutral background—was a groundbreaking reflection of modernist style when Penn began using it for fashion in the 1950s. Penn refined the style and applied it to countless subjects—be they fashion models, artists, pieces of sculpture or colorful blocks of frozen food.

In still lifes, Penn had an eye for simple, elegant compositions. In his portraits, the effect of the plain background sometimes made his subjects appear isolated and vulnerable. He once said he pictured his client as “a woman in Kansas who reads Vogue. I’m trying to intrigue, stimulate, feed her. My responsibility is to the reader. A severe portrait which is not the greatest joy in the world to the subject may be enormously interesting to the reader.”

Though Penn practiced commercial photography, his work was embraced by the fine art world. His prints have fetched six-figure prices at auctions. Penn has been the subject of numerous exhibitions over the decades, including recent shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. Penn's portraits are currently the subject of "Small Trades," an exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles through January 10, 2010.

Penn was born June 16, 1917, in Plainfield, New Jersey. He studied at design under Alexey Brodovitch at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art and went to work as a graphic artist in New York in 1938.
 
His career at Vogue began in 1943, when he joined the magazine as a designer and photographer. He shot about 160 covers for the magazine, and Vogue was still publishing new photos by Penn on a regular basis as recently as last year.

In 1995, Penn gave a major gift of his photographs and professional archives to The Art Institute of Chicago, which was celebrated in a 1997 exhibition, "Irving Penn: A Career In Photography," a show that traveled to several museums in the United States and abroad until 2000.

Penn was the brother of film director Arthur Penn. He married fashion model Lisa Fonssagrives in 1950; she died in 1992. They had one son, Tom.

Colin Westerbeck, a historian and curator who was responsible for bringing Penn's professional archives and a collection of his prints to the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1990s, says Penn was reticent about his photography, rarely speaking to the press.

"He always wanted the work to speak for itself whatever venue it was shown in," Westerbrook says. "He was extraordinarily gracious, a man with exquisite manners, very quiet and very unforthcoming, and after you’d spend 15 minutes with him you’d realize that underneath all that deference and quietness was an iron will that couldn’t be broken."

A memorial service for Penn will be announced at a later date, MacGill says.

— With reporting by Holly Stuart Hughes, Daryl Lang and Conor Risch.

Related story
PDN, February 2008: Irving Penn: Portraits from The Interior