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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Happy pictures are all alike. Every perfectionist is unhappy in his own way, and his art reminds us that life is a losing battle. Fashion, on the other hand, is the domain of promise, where youth and beauty are perpetually solvent. The conventional purpose of fashion photography is to excite envy (the wellspring of desire) while promoting the illusion that there is almost nothing one can't have. In that sense, the fashion world is an alien habitat for an artist, and the most gifted guest workers who make a living there often attempt to flee its balminess to a more congenially cold climate: an anti-Eden where the perfect couple bicker and decay.
The photography of Irving Penn is one of the twentieth century's most important bodies of work. Penn makes a distinction between his art and the pictures of clothing or accessories, which he dismisses as "commodities," but even though the fashion photographs...
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