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Despite the pervasiveness of paparazzi, blogs and YouTube videos, one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century can stand in a crowd of thousands who’ve admired his work in magazines and museum exhibitions and go unrecognized. During the John Szarkowski opening last spring at MoMA, hardly anyone realized Irving Penn was there. How could that be?

For the most part, only a limited circle — friends, associates, doctors, shopkeepers and such — know what Penn looks like. It’s practically a state secret that he has blue eyes and pencil-thin lips, is bald and slightly built. Although he’s made a few artful self-portraits, including Irving Penn in Cracked Mirror (1986), pictures of him rarely appear in the myriad books, exhibition catalogues and articles featuring his fashion shoots, celebrity photos, unorthodox still lifes, ethnographic studies and astounding nudes. We know he turns 90 on June 16, but much of the rest of his private life is, well, private.

What matters for Irving Penn are the photographs he’s made during his long, prolific career. A still life by Penn first graced a cover of Vogue magazine in October 1943, years before the painters Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Barnett Newman made their mark as Abstract Expressionists. Subsequent art movements, from Minimalism and Pop to Neo-Expressionism and appropriation, not to mention American presidents from FDR and Truman through the two Bushes, have come and gone while Penn has produced one new series or format after another. For most of their professional lives, Penn and Richard Avedon (1923-2004) were the Matisse and Picasso of their photographic generation, and both did much to erase the line between journalism and fine art. The Condé Nast-owned Vogue continues to publish still lifes by Penn in every issue.

Penn’s latest body of work is on view at New York’s Pace/MacGill Gallery through February 17. Simply called "In Flower," it offers radiant 18-by-24-inch digital prints of Iceland poppies, anemones, Gerbera daisies, several varieties of roses and a Persian violet. Vibrant yellows, reds, greens and oranges predominate, with a sprinkling of majestic purples and effulgent whites. Several plants appear as tall, thin and erect as the haute-couture models the photographer shot in 1950, when Vogue sent him to Paris to cover the collections for the first time. Others are bent by age. Quite a few are withered, ravaged by time.

Instead of focusing on their surfaces, Penn often delves to the flowers’ cores, where pollination occurs. As his primary dealer, Peter MacGill, points out, "Whatever state of life or death they’re in, Mr. Penn finds beauty." The earliest images are from the late 1960s, reprinted in 2006; the most recent are prints of pictures taken by the artist as octogenarian.

Initially, Penn wanted to be a painter, not a photographer. A few years out of the Philadelphia Museum School of Art and after two stints as an art director, he went to Mexico for a year to try his hand at painting. Realizing he wasn’t very good, Penn returned to New York and wangled a position as an assistant to Vogue creative director Alexander Lieberman. The still life Penn shot for his first Vogue cover was followed by many more taken for the magazine and for his art.

In addition to fashion models — including, most notably, Lisa Fonssagrives, the classic beauty he married — Penn photographed celebrities for the magazine, and these shots also reflect his unerring eye for detail. Famous artists, actors and playwrights come alive as individuals, with wrinkles, furrowed brows and anguished expressions.

At the age when many artists retire, Penn still has all sorts of surprises up his sleeve. In 2002 he presented two series of unusual nudes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and at the Whitney Museum of American Art. The striking prints at the Met belonged to a group shot during 1949-50 and not exhibited until 1980. At their first showing, they made few waves; four years ago, though, the reaction was seismic: Robust is the polite word to describe the headless torsos printed in an unusual, experimental process. As for the Whitney works, which date from 1999, under Penn’s direction, the hefty dancer Alexandra Beller poses seductively and moves with assurance; she’s as alluring and mysterious as any reed-thin fashion plate.

Then there was "Underfoot," the aptly named collection of gelatin silver prints displayed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2004. Shapes reminiscent of skulls, body parts and other organic substances, viewed against backdrops resembling moonscapes or abstract compositions, were actually pieces of chewing gum the photographer found on the streets of New York. What everyone else tries to avoid stepping on Penn transformed into compelling drama.

During the summer of 2005, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., called attention to another side of Penn’s craft: The exhibition’s 85 platinum prints and the collages they inspired were an homage to Penn’s skills in the darkroom. As David Fahey, of L.A.’s Fahey/Klein Gallery, puts it, "Technical proficiency is a given when you say Mr. Penn’s name. He’s the benchmark." Penn has tirelessly experimented with various papers, acids, time exposures and every other aspect of developing to fill his prints with revelations.

Against the backdrop of exhibitions of his latest work at major museums, Penn’s classics have been breaking auction records. Last April at Christie’s, Harlequin Dress (Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn), a photograph taken in 1950 and editioned as a platinum-palladium print in 1979, carried an estimate of $100,000-150,000 and then sold for $352,000. Another image of Fonssagrives-Penn, Woman in Moroccan Palace, shot in 1951 and transformed into a platinum-palladium print mounted on aluminum in 1983, carried an estimate of $80,000-120,000 at a Christie’s sale in October 2005 and went for $307,200. Last October at Sotheby’s, several fashion prints, including Harlequin Dress (1950), Woman With Roses (1950), and Black and White Vogue Cover (1950), all beat their estimates.

These prices reflect what Denise B. Bethel, director of Sotheby’s photography department, describes as "a market that is exploding." According to Bethel, five years ago the auction houses might put up 5 or 10 prints by Penn. These days, there are more likely to be at least 20. At the February 14 sale of the Thomas T. Solley Collection of Photographs, Christie’s will be offering Penn’s Café in Lima (Jean Patchett), taken in 1948. Less typical of auction fare, it carries an estimate of only $20,000-30,000.

If you ask experts to pick a favorite Penn image, they waver. Jeffrey Fraenkel, of San Francisco, one of Penn’s dealers, says: "I don’t think I can reduce it to a favorite. At home I live with three of the platinum ‘Cigarettes’ from my first show and quite a lot of others." He adds that Richard Avedon collected this aspect of Penn’s career in depth. Fahey, to the same query, cites a portrait of cartoonist Saul Steinberg hidden behind a paper mask, but notes, "The problem with picking a favorite is you have to pick six, including a portrait, a fashion print, a still life and an ethnographic work. It’s a testament to Mr. Penn’s versatility." MacGill only needs to go to his corner newsstand to be enchanted by the work of the man he represents. "Thumbing through Vogue every month, you develop a certain rhythm," he says. "But when you come to the photograph by Mr. Penn, you stop, look and stare."

Penn himself isn’t clear if he prefers his work published or hung on a wall. Art Institute of Chicago photography curator Colin Westerbeck points out in Irving Penn: A Career In Photography that in 1950 Penn declared, "‘For the photographer, the end product of his efforts is the printed page, not the photographic print,’" but that 14 years later, he felt the page was "‘a dead end’ whose ‘heartbreak’ could only be assuaged by the print." To be sure, Penn’s skills in the darkroom have improved with time.

With Irving Penn, you get two for the price of one: a great image, an incomparable print. Six decades down the line, both he and his art have aged remarkably well. Penn is a veritable man for all seasons.

"The Masterful Mr. Penn" originally appeared in the February 2007 issue of Art+Auction.