Cigarette No. 37, New York

Considered one of the best portrait and fashion photographers, Irving Penn, throughout his life, made work separate from his commercial career, including still-life studies of trash that pushed the boundaries of the beautiful. In 1972 he produced a series of photographs of cigarette butts, gathered on the street and brought back to the studio, where he placed them on a white background and photographed them with the same care and elegant dignity that characterized his fashion photographs. Penn chose the series of cigarette butts as the first that he printed exclusively with the platinum process, a historical monochromatic printing process involving the very expensive metal platinum. The subtle tonal range and lush, velvety surface of his meticulously printed platinum photographs enrich the sooty, charred ends of the wrinkled and dirty butts, lending a luxurious appeal to the discarded debris that verges on the ironic.