Volume 56, Number 18 · November 19, 2009
The Mighty Penn
By Martin Filler
Irving Penn was assured a high place in the canon of photography well before his death, on October 7 at the age of ninety-two. Yet for those of us who came of age during the 1960s, he seemed the Apollonian counterpart of his Dionysian contemporary and principal competitor, the younger and groovier Richard Avedon, who died five years before Penn almost to the day. They were the twin gods who ruled high-fashion photography after the postwar resurrection of the Paris haute couture, when they brought unprecedented formal power and graphic impact to what had been dismissed as an intractably insipid genre—'visions of loveliness,' in the sneering phrase of Penn's mentor and tormentor, Alexander Liberman, longtime editorial director of Condé Nast Publications.
Feature, 796 words
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