"He's
so great, maybe the greatest. He defines a particular period
in America for me in the same way as Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol and Walker
Evans. Avedon is such a personal photographer as well, which is ironic,
considering he called his collection simply Evidence. He is also a photographer
in the real sense of the word. He never tries to be anything else but
someone who takes pictures. A classic imagemaker."
- David Bailey
I Love Richard Avedon! His body of work continues to inspire me to see the world and the people in it with a whole new level of curiosity and wonder. Richard Avedon was able to define and share his view of the world with such care and precision that one immediately knows when they are looking at a Richard Avedon picture the same way they know when they're looking at a Coca Cola logo. Now that's branding!
Join me in exploring the life and works of one of my all time favorite photographers.
RICHARD AVEDON OBITUARY
The career of the photographer Richard Avedon, who has died aged 81, was called by Susan Sontag "one of the exemplary photographic careers of this century" - alongside Edward Steichen, Bill Brandt and Henri Cartier-Bresson. He himself had no dearth of famous names in the fields of both photography and literature to accompany his volumes of images: from Mark Haworth-Booth and Harold Rosenberg, James Baldwin and Truman Capote to Arthur Miller and George Wallace.
Avedon was born in New York; his father owned a shop on
Fifth Avenue. At 12 years old, he joined the YMHA camera
club - an early photograph shows him with his Kodak Box
Brownie in Central Park in 1935. He attended DeWitt Clinton
high school in the Bronx, where he was co-editor, with
James Baldwin, of the Magpie, the school's literary magazine,
and became poet laureate of New York high schools.
From the start - after war service in the photography section
of the US merchant marines - Avedon was linked to fashion,
fashion magazines and Irving Penn. Never more so than in
Helmut Gernsheim's oft-reiterated comments of their "creation
of a contemporary style", utilising "the same
strength" of assigning "monumentality" to
their subjects.
But whereas Penn might go for the oddest juxtapositions - like turning South Sea islanders in warrior armour into fashion plates - Avedon eschewed anything that might intervene in the arresting clarity and deceptive simplicity of the early portraits.
Attached, aged only 21, to Harper's Bazaar, he had established his own studio a year later. His studies at New York's New School for Social Research, under the legendary Alexei Brodovitch (where Diane Arbus and Eve Arnold, among others, also trained), led directly to his appointment as a staffer on Harper's, where Brodovitch and Carmel Snow were commissioning editors. He stayed from 1945 to 1965, before branching out into Vogue, working under Diana Vreeland and Alexander Liberman (from 1966), and at the New Yorker, where, in 1992, he became the magazine's first staff photographer.
It was the glossy, east-coast magazines which provided the skeleton on which all the other myriad Avedon projects were fleshed. Partly, perhaps, a question of being in the right place at the right time: one could not invent a more appropriate outlet for the stark, but often naturally lit, portraits of models, artists, the famous and the infamous.
Despite Avedon's protestations against daylight, he had an even greater resistance to shadows - including those backdrop rims thrown up by flash. Something of the extraordinary print quality of those large-format black-and-white investigations has to be due to Avedon's printers, especially Earl Steinbicken.
Avedon's own interest was always in the people, never in the fashions. In fact, the models tended to add a layer of complication to what he fundamentally believed was the relationship between photographer and sitter. As he said: "A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he (sic) is being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he's wearing or how he looks."
In the case of the model, of course, she was performing as a clothes horse, wearing the outfits and makeup assigned, and not necessarily presenting herself as she might choose. Yet it was Avedon's conviction that "We all perform" - with its necessary corollary that "I trust performances" - that allowed both for the model's interpretation, actor-like, of a given role, and his own refusal to distinguish between "the named and unnamed" (in New Yorker terms, the famous and the rest).
Initially inspired by the 1930s imagery of the great Hungarian Martin Munkacsi, who photographed fashions as if they were battleships, Avedon democratised the image, at least partly by removing it from its setting. (Even the portrait of Red Owens, Oil Field Worker, Oklahoma, 1980 has the raggedy-overalled, bearded stevedore doused in black viscosity aqainst a bare white backcloth.)
Many photographs also include the dark border running around the rim of the square-format negative, as though proclaiming "right, now you don't need to frame me any other than how the photographer did". And many of his exhibitions, including the major retrospective which travelled to the National Portrait Gallery in London in 1994-95 followed that line.
The exercise in democratising the image paradoxically
had its own fiercely political implications. Avedon protested
too much in insisting that he concentrated on surfaces
because that was where his faith lay. By concentrating
on the great unnamed of the United States, he gave us In
The American West (1985, in which Red Owens appeared),
about as different from Robert Frank's Americans as any
study could be. By using an 8 x 10 view camera and homing
in on every detail, he rendered his subjects again as much
a set of graphic compositions as he did his fashion models
in their swirling dresses.
The paradox lies in his own assertion that the moment an emotion enters into a portrait, it becomes less a statement of fact than of opinion. This puts the onus of response from the photographer on to the viewer. A wide-angle lens, used in closeup, enhanced the sense of distortion, magnifying minor defects, sometimes horrifying the viewer.
Twenty years earlier, the initially shocking, but ultimately sentimental tome Nothing Personal (1964), opened with a foggy double-spread frontispiece of a man, wearing only trunks, spectacles and a wristwatch, kneeling before an elaborate sandcastle. It closes with even softer-washed portraits of a loving couple, the woman heavily pregnant, cavorting in the sea-shallows, and of a man holding his infant up out of the water balanced on the palm of his hand. Between the two there are posed versions of numerous rites of passage.
That Penguin Books would have even considered doing as unconventional and giant a volume as this testified to Avedon's clout.
The text was by James Baldwin, who wrote that "the myth tells us that America was full of smiling people ... the relevant truth is that the country was settled by a desperate, divided, and rapacious horde of people who were determined to forget their pasts and determined to make money. We certainly have not changed in this respect, and this is proved by our faces, by our children, by our absolutely unspeakable loneliness, and the spectacular ugliness and hostility of our cities."
Avedon just focused on the faces. In 1976, he devised
a Who's Who Of America in the run-up to the presidential
elections. Sixty-nine members of The Family - those with
the intellectual, economic and political power - appeared
in Rolling Stone. They did not present pretty pictures
and Avedon himself reacted with characteristic self-negation: "I
strongly voice my emotions in my photographs ... this is
a composite portrait of the power elite, but I feel nothing
at all for the majority of these people." He goes
further, denying not only any personal responses, but any
political or moral ones by adding, "I'm not looking
to offset Republicans against Democrats, good against bad."
His goal was to reverse the tradition, voiced by Julia Margaret Cameron, of using portraiture to allow the outer form to reveal the inner spirit. Avedon was in search of the inner spirit alright, but was hijacking the former preserve of the postwar humanist photographic tradition, in searching for something generic outside of their established domain of street photography.
Even the images which most promote the child-as-father-to-the-man in the opening and closing shots of the deliberately named Nothing Personal are non-specifically misty. His defence, in the face of concerted attack for the series on his cancer-stricken father (1969-73), was that it was not the death scenes of Jacob Israel Avedon but rather of everyman.
Last month, Avedon suffered a stroke while taking pictures in San Antonio, Texas, for a piece for the New Yorker called "On Democracy". He was married twice. His first marriage was to Dorcas in 1944; he married Evelyn in 1951, with whom he had one son.
Obituary by Amanda Hopkinson
Saturday October 2, 2004
· Richard Avedon, photographer, born May 15 1923; died October 1 2004
RICHARD AVEDON BIOGRAPHY
Richard Avedon, the famed fashion photographer, greatly influenced the world of fashion, photography and art throughout the 40 years of his career (Weiley 86). He set the standards f or fashion in his work with Harper's Bazaar and Vogue from the early 1940's up to today. One may remember his "talking heads" commercials for Calvin Klein Jeans, or his "Euro-Swank" advertisements for Obsession perfume (Ansen 48) . One of his more recent projects, In the American West, was also widely publicized and highly criticized. He is best known for his unique and strikingly truthful portraits of people in front of an ever-present white background. Now in his early 70's, A vedon continues to make his mark on society.
What has made Avedon so successful? Avedon obviously has a natural born talent, but it is the freshness of his style and his technique that has placed him above the rest.
He began to d evelop these aspects as a child. A decedent of Russian Jewish immigrants, Avedon grew up in Cedarhurst, Long Island, and New York City. His family was fashion oriented with Avedon's father owning a small women's clothing store, "Avedon's Fifth Avenue." In addition, his mother loved the arts and wanted Avedon to become an artist (Ansen 54). As he grew he started to appreciate several aspects of his future career. "From the time he began photographing his sister, Louise, when he was nine or so, Avedo n has been charmed by women..."(Owen 78). He also did well as a poet during his high school years at De Witt Clinton High School, though he later dropped out. He enjoyed the works of Martin Munkacsi, the famous Hungarian photographer. Munkacsi's pictu res of models running in nature increased Avedon's interest in fashion photography (Owen 49). Said Avedon, "It was always the portraiture that interested me" (James 106). His interests soon came to fruition.
Whether it was by ironic chance or destiny, he joined the merchant marine, to work as a photographer, taking mug shots of the new enlistees (Owen 49). It wasn't exactly the best place to learn portraiture, but Avedon continually increased his experience and his passion for photography. He learned to love the "emotional geography of the face" (Ansen 56).
These events influenced his style and technique but they were not the only things to make their mark on the budding photographer. Said Avedon, "The main influences on me we re not visual, they were literary. I read a great deal...I'm so interested in the behavior and manners, and the rising and falling within the social structure" (James 105). Thus, perhaps Avedon is not so much "a frustrated painter," as many photographer s tend to be, but an "unfulfilled poet" searching for a medium that could best communicated his thoughts and emotions (Owen 79).
After returning to New York, Avedon followed his dream of working for Harper's Bazaar (Ansen 56). There he refined his style and technique and began to gain respect. He was "referred to by fashion insiders as the leading practitioner of a 'New American Vision.'" His works continued to attract attention. Later, in 1975, a large collection of Avedon's portraits wer e to be the first photographs exhibited in the famous Marlborough Gallery of New York (Owen 52, 62).
Avedon now has several books published and is referred to by American Photo magazine as "America's Master Photographer." Several wealthy fans ev en paid $100,000 for Avedon to photograph their family (the money was donated to the American Foundation for Aids) (Chua-Eoan 104).
The freshness of Avedon's style was like a door into a new room of creative photographic ideas. For one, "Avedo n used the 'look' of reality to liberate his models from their stationary poses" (Owen 52). They were similar to the works of Munkacsi that he loved so much as a child. Avedon concentrated on "movement and natural settings." "They [models] leaped off cur bs or bounced down a beach...to the supporting cast of real people: bicycle reacers, passersby, bistro regulars, casino gamblers. He became a master at capturing gesture and expression" (Weiley 86). "His famous image 'Dovima With Elephants,' taken at Pa ris's Cirque d' Hiver, is one obvious example of the way Avedon repeatedly shook up standard expectations" (Owen 56). His ideas were new and exciting. It was unheard of for a beautiful model to pose next to elephants.
Then he changed. He began to take the type of reality photographs that most photographers [especially fashion photographers] of that time would never have taken. It an was anti-fashion movement. "Avedon showed every wrinkle and bump in fine detail, an d many of his sitters did not look at all happy" (Owen 52, 62). Many of his earlier subjects were celebrities but this did not stop him. He proved as "truthful" with them as with any.
The change kept him on the cutting edge, even thought he had seemingly rejected his first love: fashion.
Avedon continued this style with "In The American West" which was widely criticized. "The style--frontal, direct, with a single subject centered, staring directly out at t he viewer-was confrontational. No background intruded or distracted the eye from the central icon" (Weiley 87). This was quite different from his earlier shots with living backgrounds and spirited subjects. This set up was passable with most critics. It was the subjects themselves that brought on the complaints. Max Kozloff, a writer for the magazine 'Art in America' says, "He [Avedon] wants to portray the whole American West as a blighted culture that spews out causalities by the bucket: misfits, dr ifters, degenerates, crackups and prisoners-entrapped either literally or by debasing work." "It is one thing to portray high-status celebrities as picture fodder; it is quite another to mete out the same punishment to waitresses, ex-prizefighters, and da y laborers" (91, 94).
Many art critiques did not recognize Avedon's work as art. Said Kozloff, "For all their harshness, Avedon's portraits belong to the commercial order of seeing, not the artistic" (97).
The project In the American West might seem a bit morbid
and maybe not all-together truthful to the whole American
West. Obviously, it would be impossible to truthfully capture
the West in its entirety anyway. Avedon himself says, "This is
a fictional We st" (Weiley
91). Perhaps the project was wrongly named. It does,
however, have a very worthy product. Douglas Davis, a writer
for Newsweek magazine says, "It
documents not the West, not the worker, but himself [Avedon],
and his own determined, exhilara ting pursuit of the perfect
photographic style" (83).
But this is what art is about. Artist communicate their
emotions and thoughts through their work. How is it then
wrong when the same thing occurs in photography. Perhaps the project
should have bee n called, A Bunch of Awsome Pictures of Weird People
in Western America (Perhaps not). Maybe that would tame the critiques.
Even after the onslaught of critics though, Avedon's work still retains an impressive, uncommon quality that grips our attention. He has a "love of surreal visual conjunctions," a "predilection for negative white space." and a "cinematic approach to still photography" (Owen 56).
Susan Weiley, a writer for Artnews magazine, states in a well written piece, that Avedon's style is so intimidating by it's perfection that "one is left with an emptiness" (91). A more positive and truthful description would be by Roland Barthes: "no certain adjective is left of the represented body [in the portrait]" (Ansen 53). Wh ich means that Avedon's pictures are worth a thousand words. Every aspect of the subject Avedon wishes to communicate is successfully communicated. His style is very effective and has stood the test of time.
Avedon's technique has also helped him achieve his respectable status. "what raises Avedon above so many others is a flaring energy--an unslakable, sometimes unseemly lust--that has driven him throughout his career always to seem more and to know more" (Owen 79).
There are sever al specific techniques that set him apart from other photographers. Avedon uses an eight-by-ten view camera and a wooden tripod (Lacayo 93) However, "film and equipment are the furthest thing from Avedon's mind during the shoot" (Owen 82). Sometimes he makes a rough outline of a picture idea in pencil or pen even before he sees the subject (James 105). He often mirrors the position of the subject, usually subconsciously, to get the feel of it (Owen 82). "Somehow, he transmits that energy and desire to everything and everyone he photographs...The intensity of his attention might seem only a flatterer's ploy, but its a quality that Avedon can't turn off even if he wants to" (Owen 79).
Avedon describes his work like this. Once the picture is ta ken, it changes from a fact to an opinion. "All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth" (Kozloff 91).
However, his developing process is not always as accurate as his philosophy. His negatives are dense because he pays no attentio n to the recommended development times. Also, Avedon doesn't print his own work. It is not surprising because his prints are huge; sometimes eight by ten feet in size. He is very involved, though, in the process and they do about a print a day (Owen 82 , 83).
Avedon's natural talent along with the freshness of his style and technique have made him who he is. "Avedon has continued to reproduce images that shock and alarm, connecting on the morality, aesthetics, and values of the culture in wh ich they are made and acclaimed" (Owen 76). This is what has kept him successful.
Bibliography
Ansen, David. "Avedon." Newsweek 13 Sept. 1993: 44-60.
Chua-Eoan, Howard G. "NA." Time 24 Oct. 1988: 102.
Danto, Arthur. "Richard Avedon." The Nation Magazine (via the Internet) 9 May 1994:NA
Davis, Douglas. "A View of the West." Newsweek 23 Sept. 1985: 82-83.
Edward, Owen, et al. "Evidence of Avedon." American Photo March/April 1994: 44-84.
James, Jamie. "Transcending Fashion." Artnews March 1994: 102-107.
Kozloff, Max. "Through Eastern Eyes." Art In America January 1987: 90-97.
Lacayo, Richard. "Into the Land of Our Dreams." Time 16 Dec. 1985: 92-96.
Weiley, Susan. "Avedon Goes West." Artnews March 1986: 86-91.
No Author. "From Museum to Coffee Table: 50 Years of Avedon." Newsweek 7 Oct. 1991: 53.
Yahoo! News Search Results for Fashion Photography
| 05/08/2008 03:55 AM |
|
Postcards, newspaper cuttings and books that have inspired a top London fashion photographer are to go on show. The Design Museum in Shad Thames is presenting an exhibition of Tim Walker's photography alongside the archive of images that have influenced him.
|
| 05/08/2008 09:51 PM |
|
A grand Art Deco mural is made whole for the first time since the Normandie sank.
|
| 05/08/2008 01:44 AM |
|
The Contact Photography Festival, running to May 31, looks "Between Memory & History" with the works of hundreds of artists on display at various venues around the city.
|
| 05/09/2008 11:06 AM |
|
The New Zealand Herald has been crowned the country's best daily newspaper and nzherald.co.nz declared the top news website at the annual Qantas media awards.
|
| 05/07/2008 10:59 PM |
|
Lights flashing and cameras clicking, the activity around the Cotton Mill in McKinney could be confused for a model shoot for a fashion magazine. While the models were not Hollywood starlets, their jobs and reasons for being there were more noble.
|
| 05/07/2008 09:00 PM |
|
From beginning to end, The Human Body is a rare visual and aural treat. One might fear that seeing heart and lung tissue from the viewpoint of a passing red blood cell might be ugly and gross, but this is rarely the case thanks to David Barlow's specialist photography.
|
| 05/09/2008 07:47 AM |
|
BLOOMINGTON -- In collaborating on a photo-art project, commercial artist Mikki Lower and photojournalist B Mosher created an exhibit that is neither journalism nor commercial art. | Photo Gallery | Video: Creating a work of body art
|
| 05/09/2008 06:56 AM |
|
NEW 7 a.m. BLOOMINGTON -- In collaborating on a photo-art project, commercial artist Mikki Lower and photojournalist B Mosher created an exhibit that is neither journalism nor commercial art. | Video: Creating a work of body art
|
| 05/09/2008 09:17 AM |
|
Well, damn! Who knew choosing an eyeglass retailer had anything to do with adoption?
|
| 05/09/2008 08:38 AM |
|
(ARA) - If art is your passion, but you never had time to pursue it, don't put it off any longer. Whether you want to explore the arts to satisfy your soul, you're ready for a career using your talent or you just want to take up a new hobby, there is an art class for you.
|
Richard Avedon Quick
Bio
Born: 13-May-1923
Birtplace: New York City
Died: 1-Oct-2004
Location of death: Methodist Hospital, San Antonio, TX
Cause of death: Cerebral Hemorrhage
Gender: Male
Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Bisexual
Occupation: Photographer
Nationality: United States
Executive summary: Photographer of the human predicament
Military service: US Merchant Marines (1942-4)
Wife: Dorcas Norwell (m. 1944, div. 1950)
Wife: Evelyn Franklin (m. 1951, one son)
Son: John (with Evelyn)
High School: De Witt Clinton High Schoo, New York City (1941)
University: Philosophy, Columbia University (briefly)
Harper's Bazaar Staff photographer 1945-65
Vogue Photographer 1966-90
The New Yorker 1992-2004