Returning to Vogue in 1946 as a staff photographer, Mr. Penn filled its pages with portraits of cultural figures like Edmund Wilson and W. H. Auden, still lifes of accessories, and graphic fashion photographs. His 1947 image “Twelve of the Most Photographed Models of the Period,” a group portrait, includes, at its center, Lisa Fonssagrives. Fonssagrives later appeared in some of Mr. Penn’s most memorable fashion images, among them “Mermaid Dress” and “Woman With Roses,” both taken in 1950, the year she became his wife.
Those pictures were made during Mr. Penn’s first assignment to photograph the Paris collections for Vogue. Using a discarded theater curtain for a backdrop and a borrowed studio filled with daylight, he choreographed some of the most spare and delicate fashion photographs yet produced, treating the clothes less as dresses to be worn than as shapes to be perceived in silhouette.