Irving Penn was born in Plainfield, New Jersey in 1917. in 1934 he enrolled at the Philadelphia Museum of School and Industrial Art, where he studied design with Alexey Brodovitch.
In 1938, Penn began a career in New York as a graphic artist then, after a year spent painting in Mexico, he returned to NYC and went to work at Vogue magazine where Alexander Libermann was art director.
Libermann encouraged Penn to take his first colour photograph, a still life, which became the cover of Vogue on 1 October 1943. Thus began an extraordinarily fruitful collaboration that continues to this day.
In addition to his editorial and fashion work for Vogue, Penn has photographed for many other magazines and for various commercial clients in America and Europe, and has had numerous exhibitions at museums and galleries internationally.
Penns photographs are in the permanent collections of many major museums around the world, including the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which honoured him with a retrospective in 1984. This exhibition was later circulated to fifteen museums in twelve countries.