In Memory of Irving Penn

A while back, I wrote about the artistic legacy of Richard Avedon. Here is another tribute to a recently late great - Irving Penn. The site site biography.com tells the following story of the life of this artist: 

"Penn originally intended to be a painter, but at age 26, he took a job designing photographic covers for VOGUE. He began photographing his own ideas for covers and soon established himself as a fashion photographer. His austere fashion images communicated elegance and luxury through compositional refinement and clarity of line rather than the use of elaborate props and backdrops. Penn also became an influential portraiturist =. He photographed a large number of celebrities, engaging each subject to sit for hours and to reveal his or her own personality to the camera. In his portraits the subject is usually posed before a bare backdrop and photographed in natural northern . The resulting images combine simplicity and directness with great formal sophistication.