The American photographer Irving Penn (pictured), famous for elegant fashion images and portraits in black and white and especially the still lifes have appeared in 'Vogue', died yesterday, October 7, 2009, at his home in New York at the age of 92.
The announcement was made jointly by his death Peter MacGill, who was also her agent, and his brother, the director Arthru Penn.
The photographer was married for 42 years with model Lisa Fonssagrives, who was his subject of sophisticated beauty shots until his death aged 80 in 1992. The giant of American photography, as has been determined, it is said in 26 years as an assistant to Alexander Liberman for 'Vogue' magazine, for whom he painted numerous covers, including the first still-life (still life) for color the October 1943. After the Second World War, Penn worked continuously for the magazine making portraits, fashion photography and still life which has defined a new "visual style" and launched the aesthetic "less is more", that is, more is subtracted from an image more effective and attractive it can stand. Penn has also taken some pictures of the icons of the sixties, such as those devoted to the Beat Generation and the "Summer Love" in 1967. Also in that year was the famous picture in which riders are posing gang "Hell's Angels," made a study of San Francisco in 1967.
Together with Richard Avedon, Penn was another great fashion photographer of the postwar period (famous for his shots Marisa Berenson), which is also inspired the filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni for the main protagonist of the film 'Blow-up'. Among his many portraits of celebrities, are those by Edmund Wilson, WH Auden, Spencer Tracy, Joe Louis and Duchess of Windsor. Penn also helped to make their entrance on the pages of 'Vogue' to intellectuals and artists such as Willem de Kooning, Isamu Noguchi, Pablo Picasso and Italo Calvino. The first images of Irving Penn and subsequent dedicated to the fashion world were made without the use of elaborate technical devices, but only with the aid of a background paper and illuminated with the simplest possible: it was precisely this which turned the masterpieces, managing to tie in a manner indistinguishable with the spirit of the model wearing the dress. Over the past thirty years Penn has focused on ethnographic portraits, nudes and studies of color, especially the flowers. Penn may have the most long-standing collaboration with the heads of the publishing house Conde-Nast, which publishes, among other magazines 'Vogue'. Since 1985 he also worked for 'Vanity Fair'.
Irving Penn is one of the highest representatives of the twentieth century, a kind of long and distinguished tradition as still life, the "still life". The photographer has always been careful to first establish a precise distance from the photographed subject. Physical and psychological, that it is to photograph actors, poets, models, fruit or cigarette butts.
His subjects are always placed in confined spaces, narrow, sometimes corners of walls built for the occasion. Never outdoors. The result is a sense of calm concentration, and claustrophobia. The character is as physically limited, but space limitations make it palpable contrast to its energy. The subjects depicted in the still lifes of objects ranging from advertising (like the series "minimalist" dedicated to cosmetic products designed for Clinique in the sixties and seventies), foods (reinvented for editorial services of "Vogue"), to dead animals to which the consumer requires new forms, materials found on the street (note his cigarette butts of the seventies). A still life "miserabiliste" using scraps of decomposing material, scrap, metals, building up to more complex still lifes that go back to the classic theme of vanitas, with bones and skulls of men and animals, along with fruits, flowers and other compositional elements.

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