01.07.09
Richard Avedon Profile
Richard Avedon was born in New York City to a wealthy Jewish-Russian family in 1923. After a privileged and idyllic childhood he briefly attended Columbia University, before being enlisting into the Merchant Marine in 1942.
It was while in the Marines that he began working as a photographer taking identification pictures of his fellow naval crewmen with a Rolleiflex, which his father gave him as a going-away present.
Returning to New York in 1944, he began working as an advertising photographer. The same year he married Dorcas Nowell, who later modelled professionally under the name Doe Avedon; they were later to divorce.
It didn’t take long for the legendary and inspirational Alexey Brodovitch, art director for the fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar, to discover Avedon. With Brodovitch’s advice and patronage, he was inspired to experiment and explore his own vision for photography and in late 1944 Brodovitch took him on as a staff photographer for Harper’s Bazaar. In 1946 he set up his own studio in Manhattan.
Over the next 20 years with the magazine, Avedon was to work with some of the greatest art directors, editors and fashion directors of the twentieth century.
Avedon’s work at this time didn’t conform to the standard, popular techniques of fashion photography. Models stood emotionless and seemingly indifferent to the camera – not Avedon’s. His models were full of emotion, smiling, laughing and moving. As he noted: “I’ve worked out a series of No’s".
"No to exquisite light, no to apparent compositions, no to the seduction of poses or narrative.” In post war New York, his work expressed a new spirit of informality and fun, imitating the changing face of fashion.
The 1957 film Funny Face, starring Audrey Hepburn as a salesgirl Jo Stockton and Fred Astaire as fashion photographer Dick Avery, brilliantly captured Avedon’s approach to photography. A visual consultant on the film, he also supplied some of the still photographs used in the production, including its single, most famous image: an intentionally overexposed close-up of Audrey Hepburn’s face in which only her famous features, her eyes, eyebrows and mouth, are visible.
Hepburn reamined Avedon’s muse throughout the Fifties and Sixies. He confessed: “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.”
In 1959 he published the groundbreaking first book of his work, Observations. Designed by Brodovitch, it featured a foreword by Truman Capote. The book combined energetic, freewheeling layouts full of unexpected crops and image choices with a mix of work from the previous 14 years.
Persuaded to leave Harper’s Bazaar in 1966, Avedon joined Vogue as a staff photographer. There he worked with another legendary art director Alexander Liberman, as well as the infamous fashion directior Diana Vreeland. This was to be a fruitful and long collaboration; he stayed with Vogue until 1990. However, always in step with the times, he began to expand his repertoire, photographing patients in mental hospitals, Civil Rights Movement marches and protesters against the Vietnam War.
As his reputation and fame grew, the great and the good of the twentieth century lined up to be photographed by ‘Dick’ and his large-format 8x10 view camera in his trademark stark, black & white approach. His portraits were minimalist, uncompromising and graphic, with the subject looking directly into the lens and positioned in front of a seamless white background. “I always prefer to work in the studio. It isolates people from their environment. They become in a sense... symbolic of themselves. I often feel that people come to me to be photographed as they would go to a doctor or a fortune teller – to find out how they are.”
This work led to a number of major exhibitions and books. However, it was not only celebrities that interested him. He was fascinated with the possibilities ‘the portrait’ offered to explore personality, and in 1979 he began a five-year project entitled ‘In the American West’. A series of images of drifters, miners, oil field workers and cowboys, it is now regarded as major turning point in twentieth century portrait photography, and by many as Avedon’s magnum opus.
When first published and exhibited, it was criticized for depicting what some considered to be a negative view of America. However, it also brought praise for Avedon, who was fêted for treating his subjects with the same attention and dignity that he lavished on politicians and celebrities.
Towards the end of his time with Vogue, he began to focus on compiling a series of books and exhibitions, looking back on his incredible career. Just as he was beginning, however, a new challenge presented itself in the shape of a staff photographer contract with prestigous weekly magazine, The New Yorker – the first such contract the magazine had ever offered.
The portrait work he produced for The New Yorker proved to be a fitting final chapter to his career. In 2004 while working for The New Yorker, he suffered a brain haemorrhage and died.
To see the work of Richard Avedon visit http://www.richardavedon.com
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