There is no photographer in history quite like Irving Penn. He built a bridge between commercial photography and fine art photography. He helped define the Vogue aesthetic and overwrote popular ideas about beauty with his trailblazing fashion photography. And he shot everything, from celebrities to still lifes, with the same thoughtful intensity. He’s arguably one of the top artists of the 20th Century, and his work is as relevant as ever.

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It’s also the subject of a new exhibition at the de Young museum at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco: a retrospective simply called “Irving Penn.” Roughly 175 images are on view, spanning every decade of the famous photographer’s storied and celebrated seventy-year career.

The show starts with documentary scenes of New York from the late 1930s, when Penn first took up a camera and took his first amateur snaps, and then segues into his famed........

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