The greatest passes.

Mrs. Irving Penn – Lisa Fonssagrives

Irving Penn has left us at age 92 and is doubtless, even now, arranging the set just so for some new work featuring his renowned high aesthetic sense in the afterlife.

No photographer of the Twentieth Century can match his all around greatness. His superb taste, his extraordinary originality, his sense of design and his exceptional technical skills – all these left one breathless. He truly was a man who proved that talent is distributed anything but evenly across the population.

He has left a prolific oeuvre which all photographers can enjoy and from which we can only learn how woefully inadequate our talents are.

Quote: “The camera makes me nervous. It’s like a razor blade. I’d like to protect myself from the incisions it can make.” There are very few images of Penn, but many by him, which is as it should be.