By 1950, Penn was a well-known Vogue portrait and fashion photographer but had already made, privately, a major series of nudes—a personal but lesser-known body of work. During the week, he photographed models wearing fashionable clothes for the magazine, but weekends and evenings he made studies of female nudes. The women were full-bodied and the photographs unorthodox, recalling the form and spirit of archaic fertility idols.
