Richard Avedon

For more information on Richard Avedon, visit Britannica.com.

(b New York, 15 May 1923). American photographer. He studied philosophy at Columbia University, New York (1941-2), and from 1942 to 1944 served in the photography department of the US Merchant Marine, taking identity photographs of servicemen. He then studied photography under Alexey Brodovitch at the New School for Social Research, New York, from 1944 to 1950; from 1945 to 1965 he worked under Brodovitch and Carmel Snow for Harper's Bazaar, contributing fashion photographs. As a young boy he had seen various fashion magazines and had been particularly impressed by the photographs of Martin Munkacsi. This influence remained in evidence in his own fashion work for Harper's Bazaar, since he, too, photographed the models outside and in motion in order to arrive at dramatic, sometimes blurred, images. From 1950 he also contributed photographs to Life, Look and Graphis and in 1952 became Staff Editor and photographer for Theatre Arts. Towards the end of the 1950s he became dissatisfied with daylight photography and open air locations and so turned to studio photography, using strobe lighting. In 1965 he left Harper's Bazaar to work for Vogue under Diana Vreeland and Alexander Liberman. Avedon presented fashion photography as theatre, and his innovative style greatly influenced other photographers; his work of the 1960s hinted at the energy and sexual explicitness of the period.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

The American fashion photographer Richard Avedon (1923-2004) was best known for his probing portraits that go beyond recording likenesses to explore the identity of society and to reflect dreams and desires.

Richard Avedon was born in New York City on May 15, 1923. Educated in the New York City public school system, he left DeWitt Clinton High School without graduating. In 1942 he enlisted in the Merchant Marine's photographic section. Returning to civilian life in 1944, he worked as a department store photographer. A year later he was hired as a fashion photographer by Alexey Brodovitch, the art director of Harper's Bazaar. In 1946 he established his own studio and after that contributed photographs to Vogue, Theatre Arts, Life, Look, and Graphis.

Innovative Fashion Photography And Portraits

Traditionally, fashion photographs depicted elegant, aloof models in static poses. However, following the lead of the innovative Hungarian photographer Martin Munkasci, Avedon produced photographs blurred by the model's motion. By using a wide variety of settings and suggesting a plot through the model's expressive gestures, Avedon introduced an emotional complexity new to fashion photography. Later he took all his photographs in his studio, photographing the models in motion against the plain, white background that became his trademark. These fashion photographs, appearing in the editorial pages of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, brought him prestige, but the lucrative part of his work was advertisements to which he seldom signed his name.

Avedon was also noted for his portraits, which first appeared in Harper's Bazaar but were later published in books and exhibited at museums and gallerys. Stylistically, the portraits and the fashion photographs are alike. The earliest ones, mostly of celebrities, are often blurred as the subject engages in some characteristic activity: Marian Anderson sings, Louis Armstrong plays his horn, Jimmy Durante tips his hat. Later Avedon did away with blurring and soft focus. Instead, a strobe light illuminates every pore and flaw of the subject's face, turning wrinkles into crevices. It was as if Avedon were trying to escape the elegant, youthful images of the fashion world by an intense scrutiny of old age and ugliness.

Of his portraits Avedon said, "The way someone who's being photographed presents himself to the camera, and the effect of the photographer's response on that presence, is what the making of a portrait is all about." The tension between the self image the sitter is trying to project and Avedon's response to that image is somewhat hidden in these photographs because of Avedon's technique. The sitters face forward, virtually filling the picture which is often printed with the black edges of the negative forming a funereal frame. Printed in starkly contrasted black and white, subjects are isolated against a white background. Without a context, the viewer is forced to focus on the sitters' personalities as revealed by their faces and gestures. The frontality of the pose, the empty background, and the harshly revealing light suggest that the photographer has not intervened. The viewer seems to see the bare truth, which in these portraits is seldom flattering. However, as the title of his book, Nothing Personal, suggests, his savage vision seems to be directed not at the subjects but at vanity and hypocrisy in general.

His portraits were virtually all of celebrities, but he did take a series of photographs of the insane, leading critics to claim that Avedon aimed his lens at the two classes of people least able to defend their privacy - the celebrated and the helpless. In any case, his later photographs are less harsh. The photographs of his father, done between October 1969 and August 1973, have been admired for their humanity as they trace his father's losing battle against incurable cancer.

Pictorial Studies of Everyday Americans

In his later work, undertaken for the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and published under the title In the American West, Avedon used his favorite white background and flat lighting. But the sitters were ordinary people rather than celebrities. Here he seemed to be following in the footsteps of the German photographer August Sander (1876-1964), who set about cataloguing archetypal Germans - butchers, aristocrats, Nazis. Avedon, too, labelled his sitters with their occupations: housewife, coal miner, drifter. Like Sander, Avedon believed that the human condition is essentially tragic.

Gentler but no less probing than his earlier portraits, these photographs explore the lives of marginal people, those scrabbling to fulfill the American dream. Like his earlier work, these subjects were photographed in flat light against a white background. The figures are sometimes framed off-center as if they had accidentally sidled into the camera's view, or they are cropped seemingly arbitrarily, reinforcing the notion that the viewer is seeing the people directly rather than through Avedon's eyes. The result is a sense of immediacy, of sincerity that is quite powerful.

Honors and Awards

Avedon has received many awards and honors over the years for his work. In 1958, Popular Photography voted him one of the ten greatest photographers in the world, and, in 1989, he received an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art in London. He was appointed as the first and only New Yorker staff photographer by editor Tina Brown in 1992. In 1996, he was profiled by Helen Whitney in a television special called Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light.

Further Reading

Avedon's photographs appear in Observations (1959) with a text by Truman Capote; Nothing Personal (1964), with a text by James Baldwin; Richard Avedon: Portraits (1976), with an introduction by Harold Rosenberg; Avedon: Photographs (1947-1977), with text by Harold Brodkey; In the American West (1985); An Autobiography (1993); and Evidence (1994). Since the texts of these books are usually only loosely connected to the photographs, the best source of information on Avedon and his work is Janet Malcom's article "Photography: Men Without Props" in The New Yorker, September 22, 1975.

Avedon can be found on the Web at the A&E Biography site, http://www.biography.com, and on the Time site at http://wwww.pathfinder.com/@@EqwXNQYAtuDpY7OJ/time/magazine/domestic/1994/940328/940328.photog.

Avedon, Richard (1923-2004), American photographer who appeared, with Irving Penn, as the most prominent of the younger generation of fashion photographers emerging during the late 1940s. Rejecting the sculptural formalism and dramatic lighting of his European predecessors, notably Horst P. Horst and George Hoyningen-Huene, he presented fashion photography as theatre. Models leaped and emoted, often out of doors, generating an aesthetic of spontaneity and light sexual candour that became the look of the post-war era.

Avedon first studied philosophy at Columbia University, New York (1941-2). In 1944, following two years in the merchant marine, during which he took identity photographs of servicemen, he enrolled in Alexey Brodovitch's Design Laboratory at the New School for Social Research, New York. Avedon began working for Brodovitch at Harper's Bazaar at the age of 22, and was a fashion photographer there from 1945 to 1965. During the 1950s he also contributed to Life, Look, and Graphis, and became staff editor for Theatre Arts in 1952. In 1965, he left Harper's to work under Diana Vreeland and Alexander Liberman at Vogue. By this time he had shifted from outdoor settings to the studio, developing a signature white-backdrop style. This approach, at once stark and highly polished, he adapted to portraiture of both celebrities and ordinary people, reasoning that ‘a white background permits people to become symbolic of themselves’.

Avedon's penchant for blending fashion and documentary modes is especially evident in the numerous books and exhibitions of his work, over whose design he maintained a remarkable degree of control. Observations (1959), designed by Brodovitch with an essay by Truman Capote, comprises dynamic portraits of celebrities such as Marion Anderson interrupted by seemingly anomalous images of street life in Italy. The book's large format announced a distinctive bold style that Avedon has maintained throughout his career. Nothing Personal (1964), with an essay by James Baldwin, combines celebrity portraits with images of prisoners and the mentally ill. In the early 1970s, Avedon produced a series of portraits of his dying father; these were exhibited at MoMA, New York, in 1974. In 1976 he photographed American businessmen and political leaders for the magazine Rolling Stone. His most controversial project, In the American West, a typological study of labourers and drifters in the tradition of August Sander and Diane Arbus, was unveiled in 1985.

Avedon's career was celebrated in the 1957 film Funny Face, which starred Fred Astaire as a charismatic fashion photographer. More traditional recognition came in the form of an exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, in 1962; a survey of Avedon's fashion photography organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1978; and Evidence, a major retrospective of Avedon's work exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1994. Avedon's An Autobiography (1993) is his own most personal statement.

— Kevin Moore

Bibliography

• Avedon: Portraits, text by H. Rosenberg (1976).
• Evidence, 1944-1994: Richard Avedon, texts by J. Livingston and A. Gopnik (1994)

Richard Avedon
Richard Avedon, 2004
Born	May 15, 1923(1923-05-15) New York, New York
Died	October 1, 2004 (aged 81) San Antonio, Texas
Occupation	Photographer

Richard Avedon (May 15, 1923 – October 1, 2004) was an American photographer. Avedon capitalized on his early success in fashion photography and expanded into the realm of fine art.

Contents 1 Photography career 2 Personal life 3 Funny Face 4 Famous photographs 5 Books by Richard Avedon 6 In popular culture 7 References 8 External links

Photography career

Cover of Richard Avedon's In the American West photo book.

Avedon was born in New York City to a Jewish-Russian family. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, where he worked on the school paper with James Baldwin.^[1] 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. Lillian Bassman also promoted Avedon's career at Harper's.

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. He proceeded to become the lead photographer of Vogue and photographed most of the covers from 1973 until Anna Wintour became editor in chief in late 1988 ^[2][3]. Notable among his fashion advertisement photograph series are the recurring assignments for Gianni Versace, starting from the spring/summer campaign 1980.

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 later the fall of the Berlin Wall. During this period Avedon also created two famous sets of portraits of The Beatles. The first, taken in mid to late 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 (solarisation of prints by his assistant, Gideon Lewin, retouching by Bob Bishop) and a black-and-white group portrait taken with a Rolleiflex camera and a normal Planar lens. The next year he photographed the much more restrained portraits that were included with The Beatles in 1968. Among the many other rock bands photographed by Avedon, in 1973 he shot Electric Light Orchestra with all the members exposing their bellybuttons for recording, On the Third Day.

Avedon was always 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. Avedon would at times evoke reactions from his portrait subjects by guiding them into uncomfortable areas of discussion or asking them psychologically probing questions. Through these means he would produce images revealing aspects of his subject's character and personality that were not typically captured by others.^[4]

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 six-year project Avedon embarked on in 1979, that produced 125 portraits of people in the American west who 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 ^[5]. 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.

Personal life

In 1944, Avedon married Dorcas Nowell, who later became a model and was known professionally as Doe Avedon. Nowell and Avedon divorced after five years of marriage. In 1951, he married Evelyn Franklin; she died on March 13, 2004.^[6];their marriage produced one son, an author and authority on Tibet.^[7][8]

Martial arts movie star Loren Avedon is the nephew of Richard Avedon.

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

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, and he went so far as 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."^[9]

Famous photographs

• Marella Agnelli, Italian socialite, 1953
• Carmen Mayrink Veiga, Brazilian socialite (Vogue's 10 best dressed), 1970
• Dovima with Elephants, 1955
• Marilyn Monroe, actress, 1957
• Homage to Munkacsi, Carmen, coat by Cardin, Paris 1957
• Dwight David Eisenhower, President of the United States, 1964
• The Beatles, 1967
• Andy Warhol and Members of the Factory, New York 1969
• Sly Stone (cover of Fresh Album), 1973
• Ronald Fischer, beekeeper, 1981
• Nastassja Kinski and the Serpent, 1981
• Pile of beautiful people, Versace campaign 1982.

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, and Twiggy.
• 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 an essay by Anne Hollander.
• Performance. 2008, with an essay by John Lahr.
• Portraits of Power. 2008, edited by Paul Roth with an essay by Renata Adler. Coincides with an exhibition of political work at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC.

In popular culture

Lists of miscellaneous information should be avoided. Please relocate any relevant information into appropriate sections or articles. (June 2009)

• In The Simpsons episode "The Sweetest Apu" (Episode 19 of Season 13) Homer states that he bought an issue of The New Yorker (in which Apu's cartoon appeared) only for Richard Avedon's pictures of Lenny, two of which we see afterwards.
• The film Capote features a depiction of Avedon's collaboration with Truman Capote and recreations of his photographs of In Cold Blood murderers Perry Smith and Richard Hickock.
• An Avedon-style photo of actor Owen Wilson, in imitation of Avedon's American West photo of a boy holding a disemboweled snake, was used in a prop for the film The Royal Tenenbaums; Wilson's mother Laura Wilson was a close assistant to Avedon.
• Avedon is mentioned in the song "Gardenia" by Stephen Malkmus and The Jicks.

References

1. ^ Staff. "Richard Avedon", The Daily Telegraph, October 2, 2004. Accessed September 14, 2009. "He also edited the school magazine at DeWitt Clinton High, on which the black American writer James Baldwin was literary editor."
2. ^ Vogue July 1973
3. ^ Vogue October 1988
4. ^ PBS American Masters, Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light, Directed by Helen Whitney, 1995
5. ^ Women's Wear Daily, October 2004.
6. ^ [1]
7. ^ The Buddha's Art of Healing: Tibetan Paintings Rediscovered, John Avedon, Rizzoli, 1998
8. ^ Exploring the Mysteries of Tibetan Medicine, John Avedon, The New York Times Magazine, January 11, 1981.
9. ^ Karney, Robyn. A Star Danced: The Life of Audrey Hepburn, Bloomsbury. London: 1993

External links

• Richard Avedon at Encyclopædia Britannica
• Richard Avedon at Find a Grave
• Official site

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)