Richard Avedon; Excellent Independent obit
Hyfler/Rosner
Fashion photographer whose dispassionate eye was applied
equally to portraiture and the documentary
04 October 2004
In 1956, Paramount released Stanley Donen's Funny Face, a
musical starring Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire. It was an
appealing and affectionate satire of the fashion press,
peopled by frenetic editors, haughty models and Dick Avery,
a fast-talking photographer. Astaire's character was
modelled on Harper's Bazaar's star photographer, Richard
Avedon, and the film depicted with awesome accuracy the
power, artifice and delight of fashion photography. Like an
American Professor Higgins, Avery takes a dowdy bookshop
assistant and vows to make her into the model of the moment,
only to find that great fashion photography is a true
collaboration between the photographer and the photographed,
a wonderful symbiosis of place, time and character.
Though film usually serves photography and photographers
badly, Funny Face, informed throughout by Avedon's own
experience, was as true a picture of a photographer in
action as there is ever likely to be. For Avedon, who had
long been both an admirer of Astaire and a true aficionado
of contemporary dance, Funny Face was photography, magically
and uniquely, brought to life.
Richard Avedon spent most of his working life as a magazine
photographer, working with models and celebrities, but his
views on photography were as serious and carefully
considered as his documentarist contemporaries. His identity
was formed by New York, a city which he venerated and which
provided him with ideas, inspiration and energy.
His father, Jacob, of Russian Jewish stock, owned Avedon's
Fifth Avenue, a women's speciality shop, where the young
Richard would spend many Saturdays. The world of women,
their habits, preoccupations, gestures and desires was
familiar to him from an early age. As a child, drifting
around the emporium, he also learnt to observe, to register
style and fashion. At DeWitt Clinton High School in the
Bronx, he was a talented and ambitious pupil. In 1941 he won
first prize in a nationwide poetry competition and was also
Editor-in-Chief of Magpie, DeWitt Clinton's literary and art
magazine. James Baldwin, who would go on to be one of the
United States' most important black writers, was literary
editor.
Avedon's photographic experiments had begun with membership
of the YMHA camera club at the age of 12, and in his late
teens he was producing fashion photographs of his sister (in
the style of Louise Dahl-Wolfe), his mother (in the style of
Toni Frissell) and his cousin (in the style of Martin
Munkacsi) which showed a vision mature beyond his years.
Like the young Cecil Beaton, dressing his sisters in gauze
against silver-paper background in the style of Baron Meyer,
Avedon was experimenting across photography's styles,
searching for his own vision.
He read Philosophy at Columbia University in the late
Thirties, going on to study photography under the legendary
Alexey Brodovitch at the Design Laboratory at the New School
of Social Research. Brodovitch's influence on the
photographers who studied at the New School was profound;
one remarked that "as fashion photographers he made us feel
that we were the élite - God's angels - baby Picassos".
The partnership of Brodovitch and Avedon at Harper's Bazaar,
where Avedon was the lead photographer from 1945 to 1965,
would revolutionise the notion of fashion photography.
Avedon gave it energy and danger - his models (and in
particular the supermodels of their times, Dovima, Sunny
Harnett and Suzy Parker) emerged as funny, elegant,
energetic and elusive, self-possessed women who joined
forces with the photographer to make striking tableaux of
the modern world.
Richard Avedon was a photographer who reflected carefully on
the medium. When asked about the value of photographic
portraiture, he remarked:
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. He's implicated in what happened,
and he has a certain real power over the result. We all
perform. It's what we do for each other all the time,
deliberately or unintentionally . . . 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 about.
When Brodovitch become art director of Harper's Bazaar, he
applied radical photographic principles to his selection of
photographers, using documentarists and street photographers
to give the magazine vitality and realism. For Avedon, who
also worked with Brodovitch on the Annual of the American
Ballet Theatre in the late Forties and contributed to
Brodovitch's own journal Portfolio, this fusion of the real
and the fictional would inform his photography for decades
to come. When Avedon made covers for Theatre Arts magazine
in the Forties (his passion for theatre was almost as strong
as his love of photography) he experimented by combining
portraiture and documentary with collage and graphic
effects, always stretching the medium to its limits.
For the photography historian Martin Harrison, Avedon's
photography was "double-edged":
The performances he directed are informed by his empathy for
"the complex nature of what it is to be dressed up, the
vulnerability, the anxiety, the isolation of being a
beauty" - these were not the concerns of his employers -
they were part of Avedon's hidden agenda, the psychological
exploration that only later transferred entirely to the
medium of his portraits.
Like so many of his contemporaries, Richard Avedon received
his photographic training in the US military, serving from
1942 to 1944 in the Merchant Marine, as Photographer's Mate
Second Class. He contributed photographic spreads to The
Helm, the Merchant Marine's house magazine while he was
stationed at the Training Base at Sheepshead, New York.
In 1943 he made a portrait, for The Helm, of two young
sailors, Vernon Beeson and Nathan J. Averick, which showed a
growing understanding of the nature of form, of the placing
of figures within the photographic frame. In Avedon's
photograph, we notice everything - the weave of the shirt,
the texture of hair and skin, the bright directness of the
sailors' gazes. Avedon dwelt on both the energy and
vulnerability of these two young servicemen - it was a
combination he would use over and over again in his
photographic portraits. When Brodovitch saw the photograph,
he was convinced of Avedon's talent, and awarded him his
first commission for Harper's.
At first, Avedon worked for Junior Bazaar, a section of
Harper's which explored young fashion. When it became a
magazine in its own right, he was commissioned for covers
and spreads. For one cover, in December 1946, he
photographed a model in a tangerine gown against a
light-drawing made in Times Square, a location which had
fascinated him since his high-school days, and which had
appeared with such effect on the cover of Magpie.
Though Avedon dealt every day with the world's most
beautiful women, wearing couture's most scintillating gowns,
he was a modest figure who could pass unnoticed in a crowd.
A snapshot from 1944, taken in front of the Capitol in
Washington DC shows a dark haired, broad-faced young man
staring expectantly from the frame.
Just a year later, he appears again in snapshot, this time
with his future wife the model Doe Norwell, and wearing the
black-framed spectacles which would become his trademark. As
with Fred Astaire, who would portray him in Funny Face,
Avedon's energy was intensely physical, wiry and animated.
Photographed in 1948 at Dior with Harper's' editor Carmel
Snow, Avedon looks more like a youthful college professor
than a star fashion photographer. Some 50 years later, in
1995, at the London opening of his retrospective at the
National Portrait Gallery, as he guided the guest of honour,
the Princess of Wales, around the show, the contrast between
her tall elegance and his slightness was striking.
At Harper's, Avedon became well known, as well as for
fashion photography, for his portraits of distinguished
personalities and celebrities. In the early Fifties he
photographed Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. While
Chaplin grinned maniacally at the camera with his two
forefingers on his head like horns, Keaton, unsmiling, held
on to his straw boater. He photographed everyone who was
anyone - Marilyn Monroe, Louis Armstrong, Marcel Duchamp,
Dorothy Parker, the Duchess of Windsor, poets, actors,
writers, designers, scientist, priests. Away from the
demands of the magazine, he continued his extensive
documentary of New York City, photographing shoe-shine men
in Harlem, mothers and babies on the Upper West Side, subway
passengers, children in Central Park, a woman striding
across a boardwalk.
Everywhere he saw form and gesture - a preoccupied glance, a
casual conversation, an exchange of looks. He photographed
on location, capturing an exchange between two models in the
Café Flore in Paris, making a portrait of Dorian Leigh
applying mascara, a shot of the decaying corpses in the
Palermo catacombs, boys jumping into the lagoon in Venice.
By the early Sixties, he had begun to make the portraits by
which he is best known and whose influence would be seen in
the work of generations of photographers, from David Bailey
to Nick Knight. Intense studies against a white background
of significant Americans from Governor George Wallace to the
poet Allen Ginsberg, from Groucho Marx to Henry Miller,
"family" photographs of Andy Warhol and the writers, artists
and musicians of The Factory, the Chicago Seven and the
Ginsberg clan. Always intensely interested in the culture
which lay beyond photography and fashion, and fascinated by
powerful writing, he worked with Truman Capote on
Observations (1959) and with James Baldwin on his monumental
photo book Nothing Personal (1964).
But Avedon, despite, or maybe because of, his great success,
was generous to other photographers. When the veteran French
photographer Jacques Henri Lartigue appeared on the New York
scene, Avedon was entranced by the spontaneity and
joyousness of his work. He edited Lartigue's monograph Diary
of a Century (1970), and for over 30 years, until the
balance was redressed, the world saw Lartique through
Avedon's eyes, as a naďve and entrancing snapshotter.
Many years later, he came across the work of a young British
photographer, Nick Waplington, then a student at the Royal
College of Art, and was instrumental in the publication of
his first monograph, Living Room, in 1991. He even
contributed an essay in the book, in which he wrote: "The
photographer's triumph is to bring order out of chaos,
without betraying the chaos." In Waplington, whose work
documented the day-to-day existence of a working-class
family in the Midlands, and pictured the burlesque of their
chaotic lives, Avedon had found an anarchy and a realism
which conformed very much to his own view of photography.
From the beginning, Richard Avedon's photographs found a
central place in New York's emerging photographic culture.
He was included in Moma's pivotal exhibitions "The
Photographer's Eye" (1965) and "Looking at Photographs"
(1973). Though he did not achieve the cult status of Diane
Arbus, Robert Frank and Gary Winogrand, Avedon was
acknowledged as one of contemporary photography's masters.
At a time when working within the fashion industry was not
seen as desirable for art photographers, Avedon was one of
the few to inhabit both worlds.
But predominance in fashion and celebrity portraiture did
not always bode well for his personal work. His Eighties
series "In the American West", for which he made portraits
of working-class Americans, and which opened at the Amon
Carter Museum in Texas in 1985, was sometimes, and possibly
unfairly, seen to be misjudged. In her essay on Avedon in
the catalogue of the 1994-95 retrospective, "Evidence", its
curator Jane Livingston quoted a review from Photo District
News:
There is something extremely cruel, even vicious, about
posing a spastic mental patient, a crippled farmer, a
one-armed knife-scarred prisoner, a pathetic alcoholic
derelict, all for the sake of producing sensational
portraits . . . This is a sick collection that expresses
Avedon's inner fears and terrifying nightmares.
Ironically, Avedon's monumental portraits of salesmen,
factory workers and the unemployed, rather than being seen
as documentary icons, became the inspiration for the new
"realist" fashion photography which emerged in the US and
Europe in the early Nineties.
By the mid-Eighties, the bulk of Avedon's editorial work was
directed towards the large-scale photo magazine Egoist.
Here, he could publish personal photo series without the
demands of the commercial world infringing on his private
vision. He photographed the crowds massing at the fall of
the Berlin Wall, and the documentary he made is remarkable,
with elements of both fashion photography and reportage. The
photographs were harsh and uncompromising, pessimistic
comments on humankind with an undoubted frisson of style.
They have a directness and an energy driven by an
imagination grounded in a fascination with the visual, with
shape and form, but above all with the sheer strangeness of
human beings.
Richard Avedon's journey through photography is a
fascinating one. His magazine work, for Harper's and later
for Vogue, is probably the finest produced in the post-war
American fashion press; and he died in Texas on an
election-year assignment, "On Democracy", for The New
Yorker, whose first staff photographer he became in 1992. In
his personal work he experimented, took risks, caused
controversy, but remained true to a photographic vision -
the creation of work which, like all great photographs,
treads the line between love and exploitation.
Val Williams
Richard Avedon, photographer: born New York 15 May
1923; married 1944 Dorcas Norwell (marriage dissolved 1950),
1951 Evelyn Franklin (one son); died San Antonio, Texas 1
October 2004.