Connecticut-born David LaChapelle has shown at Staley-Wise and at New York’s Tony Shafrazi Gallery, exhibiting his slick, sexually charged fashion work and noncommercial photographs. The 2006 "Pictures for Italian Vogue," at Staley-Wise, was firmly in the former category. But "Auguries of Innocence," at Shafrazi last fall, included three-dimensional installations evoking politics and warfare, such as Holy War, 2008, a digital C-print on recycled cardboard with audio and visual electronics — clearly not something that would translate to print.

Klein has exhibited his commercial celebrity portraiture, including images from his shoot of Pitt and Jolie for W, at Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles and at Deitch Projects, in New York. A 2006 show at Wessel + O’Connor Fine Art, in Brooklyn, contained photographs from his series for W featuring the fashion designer Tom Ford cavorting with a crew of male and female models.

Teller’s work has been regularly exhibited. He was commissioned to "interpret" the Ukraine for the 2007 Venice Biennial and decided to use the country as a setting for a W fashion shoot, mixing portraits and fashion images with documentary-style photographs. His February 2008 show at Lehmann Maupin displayed the printed pages of W together with the large-scale framed photos from the shoot. For "Nürnberg," his 2006 exhibition at Lehmann Maupin, he drew entirely from personal history. The series captures changes to the city where Teller spent time as a child — one image depicts decaying parade grounds used for rallies by the Nazis — as well as the growth of his own family over a four-year period. "He’s been so important to contemporary visual culture," says Maupin. "He’s an artist with a strong eye and a particular way of looking at things."

Two of the more obvious aesthetic references for today’s generation of fashion photographers are the images of Newton and the playfully kinky pictures of the Frenchman Guy Bourdin, who died in 1991. Bourdin was uninterested in selling his work, so his market consists of posthumous prints. His record was set at Phillips de Pury & Company, in London, in May 2008 when a 1978 image — of a woman in high heels, shown from the waist down spread across the back of a sofa — from his series of campaigns for the shoemaker Charles Jourdan sold for £8,750 ($17,254).

Although the polite elegance of classic material by Avedon and Penn is less of a stylistic influence today, the two deserve credit for being the market’s primary pioneers. Avedon was a staff photographer from 1945 to 1965 at Harper’s Bazaar, where he was championed by the legendary art director Alexey Brodovitch. He changed the way fashion was shot, showing his models in action — jumping off curbs or twirling on steps. The top price at auction for Avedon’s fashion work was set at Christie’s in April 2007, when Fashion, a portfolio of 11 prints, sold for $240,000, far above its $50,000 high estimate; his overall auction record is $464,000, paid in 2005, also at Christie’s New York, for a 1990 printing of a four-set 1967 portrait of the Beatles. This past October, Sotheby’s New York fetched $180,000 for Dovima with Elephants, Evening Dress by Dior, Cirque d’Hiver, Paris, 1955, which was originally published in the September 1955 issue of Harper’s Bazaar. The photograph is so iconic, says Wise, "that it has become the ultimate Avedon."

If there is an "ultimate" Penn fashion photograph, it might be his Black and White Vogue Cover (Jean Patchett), 1950. In its geometry and graphic punch, the image takes full advantage of the medium’s ability to create abstract patterns. It surely helped Vogue sell its magazine, and these days prints of it bring six figures: A 1976 platinum-palladium impression sold at Christie’s New York in April 2008 for $481,000, marking the artist’s second highest price at auction behind the $529,000 paid, in the same sale, for the noncommercial portrait Cuzco Children, taken in 1948.

Penn went to work for Vogue in the early 1940s, under the art director Alexander Liberman, and continues to photograph for the magazine today. He coined a new look, placing models against plain backdrops to draw attention to the fashion itself rather than the surroundings. According to Peter MacGill, of New York’s Pace/MacGill Gallery, which represents the 92-year-old artist, Penn’s work sells for between $30,000 and $1 million. Especially desirable are several of his fashion images, such as Harlequin Dress, 1950, of his wife and muse, Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn, a 1983 print of which sold for £204,000 ($406,455) at Phillips in London in 2007. "It’s a wonderful situation that this guy had a job, and he saw it as a job, but it was also his joy to make these pictures," says MacGill.