Irving Penn's Image Game: Fashion as Photography

Marco Belpoliti reflects on fashion as an image of an image, using Irving Penn as the central figure. Penn, who debuted on Vogue in 1943 and died in 2009, initially trained as a painter and drawer before destroying much of his early work to pursue commercial photography. Belpoliti argues that Penn's genius lay in the play of references between images, never reaching the meta-image but renewing the image of another by making it his own. The article, part of the 'Occhio rotondo' series, explores how Penn's photographs contain 'things' and are portraits of reality. The text is published on doppiozero.