Irving Penn American, 1917- Irving Penn (born in Plainfield, New Jersey) is one of this country's best known fashion and advertising photographers. He studied at the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art, attending design classes taught by Alexey Brodovitch, the influential art director for Harper's Bazaar. After graduating in 1938, Penn worked as a graphic artist and designer in New York, then spent a year painting in Mexico. In 1943 he returned to New York and began designing photographic covers for Vogue. Soon he was photographing the covers himself, as well as producing fashion and still-life images for the magazine. He began making portraits for Vogue in 1946 and over the years photographed numerous celebrities. It was his revolutionary series of photographs of the 1950 Paris collections for Vogue, however, that brought Penn his first great success. Avoiding the usual elaborate settings, he placed his models instead in a bare studio against a plain backdrop, focusing great care on pose and gesture. About this time Penn also began a major personal project photographing nudes and experimenting with photographic printmaking. Since the early 1950s Penn has produced advertising photographs for American and international clients in addition to his Vogue assignments and the yearly photographic essays he began in 1961 for Look magazine (1961-67). Among his most recent personal photographs are platinum prints of animal skulls. Penn's work has been featured in one-person exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1961, 1975, 1984), the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. (1963), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1977), and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1991), as well as in many group shows. He lives in New York. M.M.