"Photographing a cake can be art," Irving Penn said when he opened his studio in 1953. Before long he was backing up his statement with a series of advertising illustrations that created a new high standard in the field and established a reputation that has kept him in the top bracket ever since.

Penn has won renown as much in editorial photography as in advertising illustration, and his innovations especially in portraits and still life have set him apart stylistically. In later years, he turned to television commercials as an outlet for his unique talent. One of the most imitated among contemporary photographers, his work has been widely recognized and applauded.

Irving Penn was born June 16, 1917 in Plainfield, NJ Educated in public; he enrolled at the age of 18 in a four-year course at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art, where Alexey Brodovitch taught him advertising design. While

The other series was the famous "Small Trades"project, a large number of workers posing formally in their work clothes and holding the implements of their trade or occupation. Each was posed against a plain background and lighted from the side, the characteristic lighting that has become identified with most of Penn's portraits.

Returning to New York, he won an audience with Alexander Liberman, art director of Vogue magazine, who hired Penn as his assistant, specifically to suggest photographic covers for Vogue. The staff photographers didn't think much of his ideas, but Liberman did and asked Penn to take the pictures himself. Using a borrowed camera, and drawing on his art background and experience, Penn arranged a still life consisting of a big brown leather bag, beige scarf and gloves, lemons, oranges, and a huge topaz. It was published as the Vogue cover for the issue of October 1, 1943, and launched Penn on his photographic career.

training for a career as an art director, Penn worked the last two summers from Harper's Bazaar as an office boy and apprentice artist, sketching shoes. At this time, he had no thought of becoming a photographer.

In addition to his work for Vogue magazine (the American, British, and French editions) Penn has been represented in many important photographic collections, including those of the Museum of Modem Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Addison Gallery of American Art, and the Baltimore Museum of Art.

A close examination of Irving Penn's wide range of work allows the viewer to confront that old prejudice that commercia

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