“I can get obsessed by anything if I look at it long enough. That’s the curse of being a photographer.”
—Irving Penn
One of the principal fashion photographers of our age, Irving Penn spent his career documenting the worlds of couture and beauty in his own highly innovative and elegant style. Penn mastered the existing vocabulary of fashion photography early on and then expanded upon it to create a new ideal, in many instances redefining what constituted beauty in a photograph. While color became an aspect of fashion photography once three-color printing was practicable for magazines, no photographer exploited the potential of color with the same skill and acumen as Penn. In Four Lipsticks (New York) Penn uses color to imbue this still-life with a luxurious seductiveness, playfully but effectively fetishizing each object.