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. In Red Lips, New York, Penn wittily pairs the beautiful with the grotesque. Adopting the technique of multiple exposure, Penn projects a pair of giant red lips over his model’s mouth whose wrapped lips provide a perfect screen for this superimposition.
