Penn died Wednesday at his apartment in New York City, said his brother, film director Arthur Penn. The cause was not given.
In 1943, Penn started contributing to Vogue magazine and became one of the first commercial photographers to cross the chasm that separated commercial and art photography.
He did so in part by using the same technique no matter what he photographed -- isolating his subject, allowing for scarcely a prop and building a work of graphic perfection through his printing process.
Critics considered the results to be icons, not just images, each one greater than the person or object in the frame.
“His approach was never obvious," Phyllis Posnick, who collaborated with Penn at Vogue, told The Times on Wednesday. “He would make us go further and dig deeper and look beyond the obvious solution to a photograph to find something that was unique. He had a great wit, and you see some of that in his pictures."
Penn was a purist who mistrusted perfect beauty, which brought an engaging tension to his fashion photographs as well as his still lifes and portraits. One of his best-known shots for Vogue in the 1950s shows an impeccably dressed model glancing sideways through a veil that covers her face, as if she wasn't ready for her close-up. Lavish textures, the rich shadow and light became Penn's trademark.
His most familiar photographs are the cosmetics ads he shot for Clinique that have appeared in magazines since 1968. Each image is a balancing act of face-cream jars, astringent bottles and bars of soap that threatens to collapse. He photographed them at close range to suggest the monumental scale of Pop art soup cans.
