Wednesday, October 7, 2009
Art
Irving Penn, Photorapher of the 20th Century's Stars and Styles, is Dead
Posted
by Benjamin Sutton
on Wed, Oct 7, 2009 at 4:32 PM
The
New York Times reports today that
Irving Penn, an American photographer who shot basically every celebrity and clothes by famous designer in the second half of the 20th century, died this morning at age 92 at his home in Manhattan. You've probably seen his fun and elegant portraits of everyone from
Kate Moss to
Pablo Picasso by way of
Woody Allen,
Francis Bacon and
Truman Capote.
Personally, though, I often preferred Penn's fashion photography (pictured), which despite being very obviously posed and planned, managed to lend both the clothes and the image a sense of crazy movement and dynamism that wasn't in the designs. Weirdly, Los Angeles's Getty Center is currently showing the largest retrospective of Penn's photographs ever assembled.
Tags: Irving Penn, fashion photography, death, obit, nyc art, photography, portraiture