Beneath Mr. Penn's gentle, almost courtly manner and quiet calm lie hints of the stubbornness, the uncompromising determination and perfectionism bordering on obsession that have driven his natural gifts and earned him an international reputation.

When reminded that Alexander Liberman, the editorial director of Conde Nast Publications, wrote in "Passage" that he is difficult to work with, Mr. Penn responded: "I am. Can't you tell? I'm terribly resistant to everything. If Liberman had said, 'Wouldn't it be wonderful to photograph flowers?' I'd have said, 'I don't give a damn about flowers.' He'd say, 'Just get some flowers,' then I'd say, 'It's a waste of time, but if you want to convince yourself I can't do that, I'll try it.' "It reflects my honest feeling that I'm not capable. I don't know enough about flowers. How could I presume to know enough about flowers by just going out and photographing them? It's a sense of inadequacy."

Mr. Penn is scarcely the first high achiever spurred on by insecurity, and once his resistance is cajoled away, he gets hooked on his new subjects. "I can get obsessed by anything if I look at it long enough," he said. "That's the curse of being a photographer." He ended up photographing flowers for seven consecutive Christmas issues of Vogue.

Born in New Jersey -- he is the brother of the film director Arthur Penn -- he studied with the designer and art director Alexey Brodovitch in Philadelphia, worked for a while as an art director at Saks Fifth Avenue, then in the winter of 1941-42 went to Mexico to paint. When his art did not measure up to his own high standards, he washed every trace of paint off the linen canvases in his bathtub; he and his wife (the former Lisa Fonssagrives, model for some of his finest photographs) later used them as tablecloths.

Then Mr. Liberman hired him at Vogue, where he produced cover designs that photographers refused to follow. Mr. Liberman finally suggested he take up photography himself. Mr. Penn then wiped the slate clean of comfortable home environments and clues to the professions of his famous subjects, squeezing artists into an acute-angled corner without props; Mr. Liberman has labeled these pictures existentialist images "in harmony with the tormenting isolation of Beckett."

Later Mr. Penn swept away the Greek columns and Surrealist paraphernalia of previous fashion photography and posed his models in a blank, white space that seemed shocking until everyone else adopted it. In Mr. Penn's career, the traditional standoff between commercial and art photography took an ironic twist: his commercial work was judged too artistic and his art work too commercial. (Both were ultimately honored by museums.)