Richard Avedon

Richard Avedon (May 15, 1923 – October 1, 2004) was an American photographer. Avedon was able to take his early success in fashion photography and expand it into the realm of fine art.

Photography career

Avedon was born in New York City to a Jewish-Russian family. After briefly attending Columbia University, he started as a photographer for the Merchant Marines in 1942, taking identification pictures of the crewmen with his Rolleiflex camera given to him by his father as a going-away present. In 1944, he began working as an advertising photographer for a department store, but was quickly discovered by Alexey Brodovitch, the art director for the fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar. In 1946, Avedon had set up his own studio and began providing images for magazines including Vogue and Life. He soon became the chief photographer for Harper's Bazaar. Avedon did not conform to the standard technique of taking fashion photographs, where models stood emotionless and seemingly indifferent to the camera. Instead, Avedon showed models full of emotion, smiling, laughing, and, many times, in action.

In 1966, Avedon left Harper's Bazaar to work as a staff photographer for Vogue magazine. In addition to his continuing fashion work, Avedon began to branch out and photographed patients of mental hospitals, the Civil Rights Movement in 1963, protesters of the Vietnam War, and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

During this period Avedon also created two famous sets of portraits of The Beatles. The first, taken in late 1966 or very early 1967, became one of the first major rock poster series, and consisted of five striking psychedelic portraits of the group -- four heavily solarised individual colour portraits, and a black-and-white group portrait taken with a wide-angle lens. The next year he photographed the much more restrained portraits that were included with The White Album in 1968.

However, Avedon had always been interested in how portraiture captures the personality and soul of its subject. As his reputation as a photographer became widely known, he brought in many famous faces to his studio and photographed them with a large-format 8x10 view camera. His portraits are easily distinguished by their minimalist style, where the person is looking squarely in the camera, posed in front of a sheer white background.

He is also distinguished by his large prints, sometimes measuring over three feet in height. His large-format portrait work of drifters, miners, cowboys and others from the western United States became a best-selling book and traveling exhibit entitled In the American West, and is regarded as an important hallmark in 20th Century portrait photography, and by some as Avedon's magnum opus. Commissioned by the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, it was a five-year project Avedon embarked on in the early 1980s, which produced 125 portraits of people in the American west that caught Avedon's eye. Avedon was drawn to working people such as miners and oil field workers in their soiled work clothes, unemployed drifters, and teenagers growing up in the West circa 1979-84. When first published and exhibited, In the American West was criticized for showing what some considered to be a disparaging view of America. Avedon was also lauded for treating his subjects with the attention and dignity usually reserved for the politically powerful and celebrities. Laura Wilson served as Avedon's assistant during the creation of In the American West and in 2003 published a photo book documenting the experiences, Avedon at Work, In the American West.

Avedon became the first staff photographer for The New Yorker in 1992. He has won many awards for his photography, including the International Center of Photography Master of Photography Award in 1993, the Prix Nadar in 1994 for his photobook Evidence, and the Royal Photographic Society 150th Anniversary Medal in 2003.

Marriages

Avedon married Dorcas Nowell, a model known professionally as Doe Avedon, in 1944. After five years, they divorced and, in 1951, he married Evelyn Franklin. They also separated, but the couple had had one son, John. Avedon's nephew was martial arts movie star Loren Avedon.

Funny Face

Hollywood presented a fictional account of his early career in the 1957 musical Funny Face, starring Fred Astaire as the fashion photographer "Dick Avery." Avedon supplied some of the still photographs used in the production, including its most famous single image: an intentionally overexposed close-up of Audrey Hepburn's face in which only her famous features - her eyes, her eyebrows, and her mouth - are visible.

Hepburn was Avedon's muse in the 1950s and 60s, going as far to say "I am, and forever will be, devastated by the gift of Audrey Hepburn before my camera. I cannot lift her to greater heights. She is already there. I can only record. I cannot interpret her. There is no going further than who she is. She has achieved in herself her ultimate portrait."^[1]

Death

On September 25, 2004, he suffered a brain hemorrhage in San Antonio, Texas while shooting an assignment for The New Yorker. He died in San Antonio on October 1. At the time of his death, Avedon was working on a new project titled On Democracy to focus on the run-up to the 2004 U.S. presidential election.

Famous photographs

• Dovima with Elephants,1955
• Marilyn Monroe, actress, 1957
• Dwight David Eisenhower, President of the United States, 1964
• The Beatles, 1967
• Sly Stone (cover of Fresh Album), 1973
• Ronald Fischer, beekeeper, 1981
• Nastassja Kinski and the Serpent, 1981

Books by Richard Avedon

• Observations, 1959. A collaborative book with Truman Capote containing portraits of many famous people of the twentieth century, including Pablo Picasso, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Mae West.
• Nothing Personal, 1964. A collaborative book with James Baldwin.
• Alice in Wonderland, 1973, co-authored with Doon Arbus.
• Portraits, 1976
• Portraits 1947-1977, 1978
• In the American West, 1985
• An Autobiography, 1993. Contains 50 years of images arranged to tell Avedon's life story. Photos include celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Andy Warhol, and Avedon's parents.
• Evidence, 1994. More than 600 images encompassing Avedon's fashion photographs, portraiture, journalistic shots, sketches, snapshots, and contact sheets. However, despite containing many images, the book focuses more on the essays and text about Avedon instead of being fully based on visuals.
• The Sixties, 1999, co-authored with Doon Arbus. Contains images of many famous figures such as Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Twiggy, and rock bands like Aerosmith in the nude.
• Made in France, 2001. A retrospective of Avedon's fashion portraiture from the 1950s. The book is expensive due to the images being printed on tritone plates.
• Richard Avedon Portraits' 2002. 50 black and white images of celebrities and subjects from his In The American West project. Its release coincided with an exhibition of the work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
• Woman in the Mirror. 2005, with essay by Anne Hollander.

Richard Avedon in Popular culture

• In The Simpsons Episode The Sweetest Apu (Episode 19 of Season 13) Homer states that he bought the The New Yorker issue (in which Apu's cartoon appeared) only for Richard Avedon's pictures of Lenny, two of which we see afterwards.
• The film Capote features Avedon's collaboration with Truman Capote and his photographs of In Cold Blood murderer Perry Smith.

References

1. ^ Karney,Robyn. A Star Danced: The Life of Audrey Hepburn, Bloomsbury. London: 1993

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