Richard Avedon; Guardian obit
Hyfler/Rosner
Master photographer who captured the conflicting identities
of America
Amanda Hopkinson
Saturday October 2, 2004
The Guardian
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 an evening dress and an elephant, or turn 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 a traditional Hasselblad 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.
· Richard Avedon, photographer, born May 15 1923; died
October 1 2004
Rich Clancey
>Richard Avedon
>Master photographer who captured the conflicting identities
>of America
Thank you for not mentioning those psychedelic portraits of
the Beatles, a catalogue of obvious trite darkroom tricks rediscovered
by every freshman photography major.
--
rich clancey
Mathematical Jiggery-Pokery is Truth
And Truth is Mathematical Jiggery-Pokery.
That is all ye need to know.