Richard Avedon; NY Times obit
Hyfler/Rosner
And it's very good. But a very bad year for
photographers. Very.
October 1, 2004
Richard Avedon, Dean of Photographers, Is Dead at 81
By ANDY GRUNDBERG
Richard Avedon, whose fashion and portrait photographs
helped define America's image of style, beauty and culture
for the last half-century, died today in a hospital in San
Antonio, Tex. He was 81 and lived in Manhattan.
The cause was complications from a cerebral hemorrhage
suffered last Saturday, said his son, John. Mr. Avedon was
in Texas on assignment for The New Yorker, which hired him
in 1992 as its first staff photographer.
Mr. Avedon's photographs captured the freedom,
excitement and energy of fashion as it entered an era of
transformation and popularization. No matter what the
prevailing style, his camera eye always found a way to
dramatize its spirit as the fashion world's creative
attention swayed variously from the "New Look" of liberated
Paris to pragmatic American sportswear designed in New York,
and from the anti-establishment fashion of London's Carnaby
Street to sophisticated, tailored dresses and suits from
Milan.
Picking up the trail of such photographic forerunners
as Martin Munkacsi, Mr. Avedon revolutionized the
20th-century art of fashion photography, imbuing it with
touches of both gritty realism and outrageous fantasy and
instilling it with a relentlessly experimental drive. So
great a hold did Mr. Avedon's fashion photography come to
have on the public imagination that when he was in his 30's
he was the inspiration for Dick Avery, the fashion
photographer played by Fred Astaire in the 1957 film "Funny
Face." He also appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine in
1978 while a retrospective exhibition of his fashion
pictures and portraits was on display at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art.
Despite the widespread recognition of his work, Mr.
Avedon remained relatively insulated from the world,
spending much of his working life in the white confines of
his studio, where he could maintain control of his lighting
and, in most cases, of his models and portrait subjects as
well. Although he traveled widely on assignment, he was a
born and bred New Yorker and made Manhattan his home for his
entire life.
While best known for his published pictures in Vogue
and Harper's Bazaar, Mr. Avedon had what amounted to a
second, simultaneous career in the art world. His
photographs were first shown at the Smithsonian Institution
in 1962 and most recently in the spring of 1994 in a
retrospective exhibition organized by the Whitney Museum of
American Art. He also maintained a lucrative sideline
creating advertising photographs for clients like Revlon and
Christian Dior.
Thin and wiry, with a shock of unkempt hair, Richard
Avedon had a terrierlike intensity that could exhaust those
who worked with him. Although for most of his life he
maintained an overstuffed schedule in his East Side
photography studio, he also found time to read, attend the
theater and visit museum shows, staying conversant with the
cultural and artistic life of his day. In addition, he
supported civil rights and other social causes financially
and with his photography; in the mid-60's, he trained young
black photographers to record the marches and sit-ins in the
South.
When Mr. Avedon became the first staff photographer
for The New Yorker, , which had previously used only small
photographs, and those sparingly, U.S.A. Today suggested
that calling Mr. Avedon a staff photographer was like
calling Michelangelo the local house painter. But the staff
photographer himself saw the new position as an opportunity
to progress beyond fashion.
"I've photographed just about everyone in the world,"
Mr. Avedon said. "But what I hope to do is photograph people
of accomplishment, not celebrity, and help define the
difference once again."
Tina Brown, the editor who hired Mr. Avedon, promised
at the time that he "can do anything he wants." The master
more than proved that the confidence was merited.
His New Yorker pictures, ranging from his
never-before-published shots of Marilyn Monroe in 1994 to a
resonant rendering of Christopher Reeve in his wheelchair
this year, were topics of wide discussion. Perhaps even more
so was his patent disregard for orthodox sensibilities, as
reflected by the uproar surrounding some of his nude
photographs, including the actresses Tilda Swinton in 1993
and Charlize Theron this year - not to mention this year's
portrayal of the pubic hair of the songwriter Chan Marshall,
who performs as Cat Power.
Some of his less controversial but nonetheless deeply
insightful New Yorker portraits included those of Saul
Bellow, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Toni Morrison, Derek
Walcott, John Kerry and Stephen Sondheim. His fashion photos
at The New Yorker showed, if possible, even more edge,
especially his pictorial essay in the November 1995 fashion
issue. It featured a human skeleton carrying on with elegant
models.
His own archives also yielded visual treasures for the
magazine, including portraits of Audrey Hepburn, W. H. Auden
and Rudolf Nureyev's foot.
Unlike his upbeat and glamorous fashion photography,
Mr. Avedon's portraiture chronicled a growing sense of
disillusionment about the possibilities of American life and
culture, especially after the photographer's optimistic
years in the 50's and early 60's. From the start, his
portraits seemed intent on peeling away the bright sheen of
celebrity to reveal the ordinary, often insecure human being
underneath, but in the 1970's they became focused on
depicting the trials of aging and death.
In 1969 he photographed the antiwar movement,
including the Chicago 7 during their raucous conspiracy
trial. In 1976, America's bicentennial year, he photographed
73 men and women in power for Rolling Stone magazine;
working with the writer Renata Adler, who helped with the
selection of people and photographs, the collection was
called "The Family." Between 1978 and 1984 he produced a
major body of portraits of people he believed were
representative of the current spirit of the American West;
his unhappy cast of ex-convicts, drifters, drinkers and
others with hard-luck stories led some observers to complain
that he had become cynical and misanthropic.
But Mr. Avedon always maintained that his portraits,
like his fashion pictures, were simply records of
appearances. "My photographs don't go below the surface," he
once said. "They don't go below anything. They're readings
of what's on the surface. I have great faith in surfaces. A
good one is full of clues."
Mr. Avedon's mostly black-and-white photography was
featured in a number of books and exhibition catalogs during
his lifetime, including "Observations" (1959), with a text
by Truman Capote; "Nothing Personal" (1964), with text by
James Baldwin; and "Portraits" (1976), with an essay by the
art critic Harold Rosenberg. His portraits from the West
were published in the 1985 book "In the American West," in
conjunction with a traveling exhibition organized by the
Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth. "An Autobiography," an
album of his photographs that he intended as a visual life's
testament, was published by Random House in 1993.
A notorious stickler for precision in his photographic
technique, Mr. Avedon long sought to control the
organization and layout of his books and exhibitions,
believing that the meaning of his images was in large part
determined by their contexts, whether on the wall or in
reproduction.
This was certainly apparent on the magazine page,
where his pictures were characteristically distinctive and
elegant. Although as a staff photographer at Harper's Bazaar
(1946-1965) and later at Vogue (1966-1970) he was somewhat
at the mercy of the magazine's fashion editors and art
director, his photographs in reproduction virtually jump off
the page with a signature brand of visual impact. He sought
the same kind of stimulation in his exhibitions, creating
prints that depicted their subjects larger than life-size
and that towered over the viewer. One image, a group
portrait of the denizens of Andy Warhol's fabled "Factory,"
was exhibited in a print some 8 feet high and 35 feet wide.
John Szarkowski, a former director of photography at
the Museum of Modern Art in New York, wrote in 1973 that the
importance of Mr. Avedon's photography "lies in the fact
that it constitutes a coherent and challenging composite
portrait of many of the mythic figures and spear carriers of
the worlds of art, style and high salesmanship."
Richard Avedon was born in New York City on May 15,
1923. His father, Jacob Israel, a second-generation
Russian-Jewish immigrant, was the proprietor of Avedon's
Fifth Avenue, a Manhattan clothing store. His mother, Anna
Avedon, came from a family that owned a dress manufacturing
business. As a boy, Avedon avidly read fashion magazines and
decorated the walls of his room with tear sheets of the
fashion photographs he admired.
"One evening my father and I were walking down Fifth
Avenue looking at the store windows," he once told Newsweek.
"In front of the Plaza Hotel, I saw a bald man with a camera
posing a very beautiful woman against a tree. He lifted his
head, adjusted her dress a little bit and took some
photographs. Later, I saw the picture in Harper's Bazaar. I
didn't understand why he'd taken her against that tree until
I got to Paris a few years later: the tree in front of the
Plaza had that same peeling bark you see all over the
Champs-Elysees.`'
Mr. Avedon attended De Witt Clinton High School, where
he and James Baldwin were co-editors of The Magpie, the
school's literary magazine. He attended Columbia University
for a year and then joined the Merchant Marine, where he was
assigned to the photo section. There he learned photography,
taking thousands of identification portraits of sailors.
Upon leaving the Merchant Marine in 1944 he sought out
Alexey Brodovitch, an influential designer and the art
director of Harper's Bazaar, and enrolled in his class at
the New School for Social Research. In what was officially
called the Design Laboratory, Mr. Brodovitch offered
criticism and encouragement to photographers, graphic
designers and illustrators, and on occasion, provided them
with paying assignments for the magazine.
Mr. Brodovitch and the 21-year-old Avedon formed an
immediate and close bond; in 1945 Mr. Avedon's photographs
began appearing in Junior Bazaar and, a year later, in
Bazaar itself. After being placed on the magazine's payroll,
he opened his own studio, which Mr. Brodovitch chose to use
as the off-campus home of his Design Laboratory classes into
the 1950's. Mr. Brodovitch gave Mr. Avedon many plum
assignments, including the privilege of covering the Paris
spring and fall collections, much to the annoyance of the
magazine's veteran staff photographers, including Louise
Dahl-Wolfe.
While Carmel Snow, the legendary editor of Harper's
Bazaar, covered the runway shows in Paris, Mr. Avedon had
the more daunting task of arranging to photograph the new
designer dresses as luxurious, but wearable, objects of
desire. In 1954 he took his models to stereotypical French
cafes, nightclubs and casinos, surrounding them with
dinner-suited escorts. The following year he made fashion
history by setting the couture-gowned models in the midst of
a circus. The most memorable of those images, "Dovima With
Elephants," shows the most famous model of her day in an
ankle-length Dior gown, standing in straw and holding the
trunk of one elephant with one hand while gesturing toward
another.
Mr. Avedon was encouraged by Mr. Brodovitch to break
the boundaries of conventional fashion photography, mixing
reality and fantasy with surrealist effect, and he soon
learned to visualize his pictures in strictly graphic terms.
At first he specialized in on-location scenes that included
swirls and blurs of motion, in the manner of Munkacsi 10
years earlier. His later adoption of a seamless white studio
background for most of his fashion and portrait photography
was at least partly inspired by Mr. Brodovitch's
characteristic use of "white space," a means of making the
subject seem suspended and weightless on the page.
Although Mr. Avedon made several attempts at
photographing in the traditional documentary mode, including
a number of street scenes taken on trips to Italy in 1946
and 1947 and a grainy series of images of patients at a
Louisiana mental hospital in 1963, his significant
contribution to photography's documentary mode rests with
his studio portrait style, and especially with his use of
neutral white backgrounds. In the studio he could isolate
his subjects not only graphically but also psychologically,
producing a convincing illusion of a direct confrontation
between the person in the picture and the viewer.
Mr. Avedon's deceptively simple portrait style was
capable of a wide emotional range. He used it to glamorize
some of the most beautiful women of the 20th century,
including the model Dorian Leigh and her sister Suzy Parker,
Jean Shrimpton, the actress Anna Magnani, and a young
Jacqueline Kennedy on the eve of her husband's inauguration
as president. But he also could make the mighty and powerful
seem ill at ease, if not ridiculous. His portrait of
President Eisenhower, taken in 1964, made the great general
and world leader appear "like a mental defective," the
writer Janet Malcolm observed in a 1978 New Yorker essay on
Mr. Avedon's photography. She found his portraits in the
main to be "sharp, black, inky, nasty," representing the
antithesis of his flattering fashion photographs.
But his portraits of such cultural figures as Ezra
Pound, Charles Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe and Allen Ginsberg
could be both sympathetic and moving. Clearly siding with
the romantic posture of the alienated artist, Mr. Avedon
could penetrate the carefully constructed public image of
someone like Monroe and present her as an apparently
anguished individual caught up in a role that, like a dress
cut one size too large, never quite fit.
In the mid-60's, after Carmel Snow and Alexey
Brodovitch had stopped working and at the height of a
fashion revolution that featured the miniskirt and a new
generation of youthful designers, Mr. Avedon left Harper's
Bazaar for its competitor, Vogue. There he worked with
Alexander Liberman, another remarkable Russian émigré art
director. Although he was on Vogue's staff only until the
end of that decade, Mr. Avedon continued his association
with the magazine, and with Mr. Liberman, for more than 20
years.
In 1962 Eugene Ostroff, a curator at the Smithsonian
Institution, offered Mr. Avedon his first museum exhibition.
He seized the offer as a chance to experiment with
presenting his pictures outside the pages of a book or
magazine, insisting on an installation in which his prints
overlapped one another and filled every inch of space on the
gallery walls, in the style of a collage. The exhibition had
an irresistible impact on viewers and proved popular, but
the individual pictures tended to be lost in a sea of visual
overkill.
By the 1970's Mr. Avedon was becoming increasingly
conscious of the recognition of photography in the art
world, and of his own place in the artistic traditions of
the medium. He served as the editor of the book "Diary of a
Century: Photographs by Jacques-Henri Lartigue" (1970),
helping to bring greater acclaim to a photographer who has
since been recognized as one of the most original camera
artists of the last century. In 1974 his searing portrait
series of his terminally ill father was exhibited at the
Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in 1975 a large
exhibition of his portraits was presented at the Marlborough
Gallery. The two shows catapulted his work into the center
of the growing discussion about photography's power as a
contemporary art form.
Two years later a retrospective exhibition of his
fashion and portrait photography, "Richard Avedon:
Photographs 1947-1977," was organized at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art and subsequently traveled to museums in
Dallas, Atlanta and Tokyo. In 1980 another retrospective was
organized by the University Art Museum in Berkeley. Both
exhibitions featured larger-than-life, finely detailed
black-and-white prints with the black edges of the negative
included as part of the picture.
Mr. Avedon was capable of being profound and succinct
in both pictures and words. His definition of a portrait is
a model of concision: "A photographic portrait is a picture
of someone who knows he's 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." By the same token,
his 1977 picture of LouLou de la Falaise tells us all we
might wish to know about fashion's irresistible allure, and
his 1969 image of Andy Warhol's scarred torso tells us more
than we might wish to know about the perils of celebrity.
In 1982 Mr. Avedon produced a playfully inventive
series of advertisements for Christian Dior, based on the
idea of film stills. Featuring a stock cast of models and
actors, the color photographs purported to show scenes from
the life of a fictional "Dior family," whose members managed
to wear elegant fashions even when wrestling with one
another on a couch. While Mr. Avedon photographed with color
film for most of his career, he used it primarily for
fashion and beauty pictures. The photographs that he valued
most and that were exhibited as art in museums were
uniformly black and white.
While continuing to maintain a hectic pace of
picture-taking at an age when many would have sought
retirement, Mr. Avedon also spent his last years reflecting
on his considerable archive of photographs and attempting to
organize the pictures in a way that would summarize his own
life. His long-awaited "Autobiography," published in 1993,
turned out to be not the expected verbal explanation of his
career, but a visual narrative that mixed old and new
pictures, fashion and portraiture, family snapshots and
reportage. It included pictures of Mr. Avedon's father,
mother and stepmother; his sister, Louise; his first wife,
Dorcas Norwell, a former model whom he divorced; his second
wife, Evelyn; their son, John, and their grandchildren.
By the late 90's, The New Yorker had hired more staff
photographers, but Mr. Avedon continued to use the magazine
to showcase work he considered special. For an Election Day
issue, he roamed America to photograph prominent
politicians, ordinary voters and all manner of characters in
between.
Mr. Avedon's photographs are in the collections of the
Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the
Minneapolis Art Museum, the National Museum of American
History, the Smithsonian Institution, the Amon Carter Museum
of Art and many other museums in the United States and
abroad. Many are portraits in which the illusion of
objectivity is rigorously maintained.
"A portrait is not a likeness," Richard Avedon said at
the time of "In the American West."The moment an emotion or
fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact
but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a
photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is
the truth."
Hyfler/Rosner
A very bad year for
photographers. Very.
To recap:
Denise Colomb, 1/2
Helmut Newton, 1/23
Francesco Scavullo, 1/6
Leni Sonnenfeld, 2/26
Eileen Darby Lester, 3/30
Rex Simpson Hardy, 4/7
Nikolai Ignatiev, 6/15
Josef Scaylea 7/19
Van Deren Coke,7/22
Walter Frentz 7/26
Ellen Auerbach 7/31
Henri Cartier-Bresson 8/2
Carl Mydans 8/16
Frank Hurley, 9/9
Eddie Adams, 9/29
Richard Avedon, 10/1
Feel free to add to this if I've left anyone out. This is
year to date. If you make it the last 12 months, it's even
worse.
Bob Feigel
wrote:
>
> And it's very good. But a very bad year for
>photographers. Very.
>
> October 1, 2004
> Richard Avedon, Dean of Photographers, Is Dead at 81
> By ANDY GRUNDBERG
>
>
>
> Richard Avedon, whose fashion and portrait photographs
>helped define America's image of style, beauty and culture
>for the last half-century, died today in a hospital in San
>Antonio, Tex. He was 81 and lived in Manhattan.
>
A very bad year indeed.
I'm surprised that none of the obituaries I've read so far mention his
amazing head-on shots of the Beatles. b
"When weaving nets, all threads count." - Charlie Chan
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Wax-up and drop-in of Surfing's Golden Years: <http://www.surfwriter.net>
Hyfler/Rosner
"Bob Feigel" <b...@surfwriter.net.not> wrote in message >
> I'm surprised that none of the obituaries I've read so far
> mention his
> amazing head-on shots of the Beatles. b
>
http://www.beatles-popart.com/
J.D. Baldwin
P. Michael O'Sullivan, the famous rubber bullet photo guy.
Edmund Shea, whose obit you posted a day or two ago.
Josef Scaylea, who took all those great photos of Mt. Rainier.
Robert Steinau, Pulitzer Prize-winner.
Henry Anszczak, the brilliant school portrait photographer.
Harold Robinson, the former Detroit News photographer.
Jack Leigh, who shot the "Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil" cover.
Angelo Spinelli, WW II photographer.
--
_+_ From the catapult of |If anyone disagrees with any statement I make, I
_|70|___:)=}- J.D. Baldwin |am quite prepared not only to retract it, but also
\ / bal...@panix.com|to deny under oath that I ever made it. -T. Lehrer
***~~~~-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Terrymelin
Terry Ellsworth
Terrymelin
>of him.
>
>David Carson
For me he will always be "Fred Astaire" in "Funny Face."
Terry Ellsworth
Brad Ferguson
<rel...@rcn.com> wrote:
Ah. Look magazine, 1967 -- and I see they were originally published in
Stern, which I didn't know. Thanks again.
Brad Ferguson
<da...@neosoft.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 02 Oct 2004 10:07:34 +1200, Bob Feigel <b...@surfwriter.net.not>
> wrote:
>
> >I'm surprised that none of the obituaries I've read so far mention his
> >amazing head-on shots of the Beatles. b
>
> His Beatles photos are the first thing that comes to my mind when I think
> of him.
>
> David Carson
I should have waited a moment before posting my bit about his Beatles
portraits just now. (I see Amelia's supplied a link. Thanks.)
James Neibaur
terry...@aol.com wrote on 10/1/04 6:01 PM:
The finest photographer to be active during my lifetime. His pictures were
art.
RIP
JN
Hyfler/Rosner
"J.D. Baldwin" <INVALID...@example.com.invalid> wrote
in message >>
>>
>> To recap:
>>
>> Denise Colomb, 1/2
>> Helmut Newton, 1/23
>> Francesco Scavullo, 1/6
>> Leni Sonnenfeld, 2/26
>> Eileen Darby Lester, 3/30
>> Rex Simpson Hardy, 4/7
>> Nikolai Ignatiev, 6/15
>> Josef Scaylea 7/19
>> Van Deren Coke,7/22
>> Walter Frentz 7/26
>> Ellen Auerbach 7/31
>> Henri Cartier-Bresson 8/2
>> Carl Mydans 8/16
>> Frank Hurley, 9/9
>> Eddie Adams, 9/29
>> Richard Avedon, 10/1
>
> P. Michael O'Sullivan, the famous rubber bullet photo guy.
Yeah, where's the photo. No one came up with it?
>
> Edmund Shea, whose obit you posted a day or two ago.
Right. Except I'm not sure he was quite as famous as these
guys..
>
> Josef Scaylea, who took all those great photos of Mt.
> Rainier.
He's already there in the list.
Thanks for the all the others.
Terrymelin
>art.
>
>RIP
I agree with you -- to a point. For his field, yes. But the finest photographer
who was active in my lifetime was Henri Cartier-Bresson. Hands down.
Terry Ellsworth
James Neibaur
terry...@aol.com wrote on 10/1/04 10:23 PM:
> But the finest photographer
> who was active in my lifetime was Henri Cartier-Bresson. Hands down.
Hard to argue -- I give the edge to Avedon however.
RIP
JN
Joe Pucillo
> A very bad year for
> photographers. Very.
Gulp.
JP
Terrymelin
>
>RIP
>
>JN
I think you'd find that Bresson would be the critical consensus because there
are those will still downgrade Avedon (unfairly in my opinion) as a "fashion
photog."
Terry Ellsworth
James Neibaur
terry...@aol.com wrote on 10/2/04 8:28 AM:
> I think you'd find that Bresson would be the critical consensus because there
> are those will still downgrade Avedon (unfairly in my opinion) as a "fashion
> photog."
I agree -- and certainly my preference for Avedon would not belittle the
brilliant work that Bresson offered.
JN
Hyfler/Rosner
"Hyfler/Rosner" <rel...@rcn.com> wrote in message
news:cjkirq$rd0$1...@bob.news.rcn.net...
>
> And it's very good. But a very bad year for
> photographers. Very.
>
> October 1, 2004
> Richard Avedon, Dean of Photographers, Is Dead at 81
> By ANDY GRUNDBERG
>
Below the fold. But big. Middle three columns wide. Half
a page deep. Two photos, the one of Avedon from behind the
camera that's been in all the news articles, shot by Patrick
Demarchelier. The other, the photograph of the model Dovina
in Dior among the elephants at the 1955 Paris fashion shows.
Inside, one full page. Photos: Model in a casino
setting.( 1954) A portrait triptych of Igor
Stravinsky.(1969) And the photo of the Chicago Seven.
(1969)
There are additional photos at nytimes.com/arts
Hyfler/Rosner
"Joe Pucillo" <new...@pucillo.net.xx> wrote in message
news:MPG.1bc7f477b...@news.west.earthlink.net...
I should have added the word "famous."
Brigid Nelson
I think we're seeing the end of an age. It's very dramatic in that it's
happening all at once.
brigid
Hyfler/Rosner
>> To recap:
>>
>> Denise Colomb, 1/2
>> Helmut Newton, 1/23
>> Francesco Scavullo, 1/6
>> Leni Sonnenfeld, 2/26
>> Eileen Darby Lester, 3/30
>> Rex Simpson Hardy, 4/7
>> Nikolai Ignatiev, 6/15
>> Josef Scaylea 7/19
>> Van Deren Coke,7/22
>> Walter Frentz 7/26
>> Ellen Auerbach 7/31
>> Henri Cartier-Bresson 8/2
>> Carl Mydans 8/16
>> Frank Hurley, 9/9
>> Eddie Adams, 9/29
>> Richard Avedon, 10/1
>
>
> Edmund Shea, whose obit you posted a day or two ago.
>
>
> Henry Anszczak, the brilliant school portrait
> photographer.
>
> Harold Robinson, the former Detroit News photographer.
>
> Jack Leigh, who shot the "Midnight In The Garden Of Good
> And Evil" cover.
>
> Angelo Spinelli, WW II photographer.
Adding:
George Silk
Ezra Stoller
Ivan Kyncl
Steve Steigman