Richard Avedon

Richard Avedon People

23 August ““ 24 November 2013
National Portrait Gallery
King Edward Terrace, Canberra, ACT
www.portrait.gov.au

The first major exhibition in Australia by American photographer Richard Avedon (1923-2004) is now showing at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra.

The exhibition features 80 original photographs, focusing mainly on Avedon’s portraits from the second half of last century.

Richard Avedon People is at National Portrait Gallery 23 August ““ 24 November 2013 and then at Monash University’s Monash Gallery of Art, Melbourne, and the Art Gallery of Western Australia in late 2013 and early 2014.

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The article below was first published in  Photo Review  magazine April-May 2005 issue.

Richard Avedon: fashion photographer and portraitist

Richard Avedon may have defined fashion photography in the late twentieth century – but it did not define him.

When he died in late September 2004 at the age of 81, Richard Avedon was in Texas working on a major documentary project called “On Democracy” for New Yorker magazine. For some months prior to his death, he’d been travelling around the USA, making portraits of politicians, party officials and ordinary citizens.

It might well have pleased him to know that he’d end his career while working on just such a project. In an interview in 1974, he said, ‘There’s always been a separation between fashion and what I call my deeper work. Fashion is where I make my living. I’m not knocking it; it’s a pleasure to make a living that way. Then there’s the deeper pleasure of doing my portraits.’

Avedon was born in 1923 in New York City. His Russian-Jewish immigrant parents ran a successful Fifth Avenue women’s clothing store until the stockmarket crash of 1929. The connection with style and fashion seems to have shaped the young Avedon. While a boy, he is said to have collected numerous autographs of famous entertainers and in later years he remarked that this early fascination with celebrity was born in a sense out of a deep desire to escape his family’s straightened existence and his mundane prospects.

While he was still in high school, Avedon joined the Merchant Marine where he worked as a photographer. Significantly, his main activity was the incredibly tedious task of shooting sailors’ identification pictures. He is reported later to have described this experience as having been important to his subsequent work.

In 1945 he became a staff photographer for Harper’s Bazaar. The standard of his work rapidly established him as one the New York publishing scene’s best young photographers. It is generally accepted that with the publication of his series of Dior-clad models amidst circus scenes, Avedon truly arrived. One of the strongest images is of the supermodel of her day, Dovima gesturing enigmatically whilst standing between two elephants.

The idea of creating a fashion spread that told a story did not start with Avedon, but there is little doubt that it was he who refined and extended it to a degree not hitherto seen. Within a few years, the approach was being copied right across the world of glossy fashion magazines.

Even as he was earning fabulous sums and a towering reputation for his editorial and advertising photography, Avedon continued to pursue the art of portraiture. He photographed the mighty and humble, and he did so in a way that few other photographers have managed. Eschewing the theatrical and visually arresting backgrounds of his fashion work, he instead placed his subjects in front of a plain white background.

His lighting technique, and more importantly his capacity to press the shutter button at exactly the moment his sitters relinquished control over the presentation of their persona, resulted in portraits that are extraordinarily distinctive. Critics predictably used terms like ‘brutal’, ‘unflinching’ and ‘pitiless’ to describe the look of an Avedon portrait. But Avedon himself was disinclined to accept such interpretations as adequate explanations of his intentions.

‘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.’