Richard Avedon was born in New York in 1923, into a family already fluent in image. His father ran a women’s clothing shop on Fifth Avenue, and his mother sewed her own dresses, copied from the fashion magazines she devoured. He grew up among shop windows and fabric samples, in an America just beginning to believe that appearance was a language of its own. No one, at the time, imagined he would become one of its most influential grammarians.
He became a photographer almost by accident, or rather by military obligation. Drafted into the U.S. Merchant Marine in 1942 at nineteen, he was assigned to the photographic section at the Sheepshead Bay base in Brooklyn. His job was to shoot identification photographs of tens of thousands of sailors before they shipped out, using a simple Rolleiflex. Blank white background, flat lighting, strict frontal pose, no expression to spare. It was purely administrative work, repetitive, with no aesthetic ambition at all. And yet it was there, inside that bureaucratic constraint, that the style which would define the rest of his career was born without his knowing it. That absolute white background, that frontality leaving the subject nowhere to hide, would become the signature of his most celebrated portraits decades later.
Discharged in 1944, he tried his luck at Harper’s Bazaar. After several rejections, he finally got a meeting with the magazine’s art director, Alexey Brodovitch, alongside editor-in-chief Carmel Snow. They looked at his portfolio and hired him on the spot. Brodovitch, who also taught photography in his own workshop at the New School, brought him into his class and became his mentor. The bond between the two men formed instantly and ran deep. Within a year, Avedon went from occasional photographer for the Junior Bazaar supplement to staff photographer for the magazine itself. Brodovitch sent him to Paris to cover the 1947 couture collections. At twenty-four, Avedon discovered Europe and began making his mark.
What he brought was nothing less than a complete overhaul of fashion photography. Until then, the genre had followed cold, static formulas: models frozen in the studio, hieratic poses, no life in them at all. Avedon, initially denied the use of a studio, started photographing his models in the street, in cafés, among street performers or real passersby. He introduced movement, spontaneity, a kind of narrative into the fashion image. His models no longer posed. They lived, laughed, ran. By 1950, he was already the most imitated American editorial photographer of his generation. In 1955, he shot one of the most famous images in the history of fashion: Dovima, the era’s most sought-after model, draped in a Dior evening gown, posed between two circus elephants, one hand resting on a trunk, the other reaching toward the second animal. The contrast between the sheer grace of her silhouette and the raw power of the animals sums up everything Avedon was after, the tension between artifice and the physical truth of the world.
In 1965, after guest-editing an issue of Harper’s Bazaar in which he chose to photograph Black models, he faced a storm of internal criticism and left the magazine that had trained him. He joined Vogue the following year as the first staff photographer in the title’s history, a post he held for more than twenty years, until 1988. In 1992, Tina Brown, newly installed as editor of The New Yorker, hired him as the magazine’s first-ever staff photographer. He stayed there until his death.
But it was in portraiture, even more than in fashion, that Avedon left his most lasting philosophical mark. His method barely changed: an 8×10 view camera, a stark white background, the subject isolated from any context, any setting, any prop. Nothing to hide behind. He would sit his subjects in front of the lens and engage them, sometimes for hours, in a kind of conversation, provocation, psychological stripping down, until he caught that fraction of a second when the social mask fell away. “Portraiture is performance,” he said. “I trust performances.” He wasn’t after likeness. He was after a confession.
His most quoted line sums up his whole philosophy: “A portrait is not a likeness. 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.” He went further still, insisting that the sitter has, in truth, no power over the image: “A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. […] We have separate ambitions for the image. His need to plead his case probably goes as deep as mine, but the control is with me.” That line, almost cruel in its clarity, says everything about the balance of power Avedon held with the people he photographed. A kind of cold tenderness, a controlled aggression, a silent pact in which the subject agrees to lose so the image can win.
That demand for psychological truth came, in large part, from his younger sister, Louise. She was his very first muse. He would later admit that every model he was drawn to as an adult was really just a memory of her. Diagnosed with schizophrenia as a teenager, Louise slid into near-catatonic silence after a stint working in her brother’s studio, then spent the rest of her life institutionalized, dying at forty-two. That private wound, that mix of fragile beauty and incurable pain, runs through all of Avedon’s work: his fascination with faces that crack, with bodies that no longer have the strength to hold a pose, with whatever hides behind apparent perfection.
In 1964, he published Nothing Personal with James Baldwin, his friend since DeWitt Clinton High School, where the two teenagers had already co-edited the school’s literary magazine. The book, made in the thick of the civil rights era, examined American identity through paired portraits and text, unsparing about segregation and the country’s social violence. Twelve years later, in 1976, Rolling Stone commissioned him to cover the presidential primaries. Avedon proposed something else instead, a bigger project he had been nursing for a long time: photographing the people who, in his view, actually held power in America. The result, published as The Family, lined up sixty-nine black-and-white portraits, all shot in his usual grammar (white background, frontal pose, no artifice), from Henry Kissinger to Ronald Reagan, from Jimmy Carter to Katharine Graham, by way of George Bush and Cesar Chavez. American power, stripped of all setting, reduced to its faces.
He photographed the icons of his era with the same lack of indulgence. In 1957, he drew from Marilyn Monroe a portrait still remembered for its sadness. After a session in which the actress had danced, sung, flirted, played “Marilyn Monroe” for hours like a part to perform, she suddenly collapsed, sitting in a corner like a child, with everything gone. That’s the moment of collapse Avedon chose to keep. In 1969, he brought the figures of Andy Warhol’s Factory into his own studio, Candy Darling, Joe Dallesandro and the rest, for a frieze of nude portraits stitched together, as raw as it was fascinated. In 1967, he delivered four solarized, psychedelic portraits of the Beatles, an almost hallucinatory experiment in color, the complete opposite of his usual discipline. Proof that he, too, could let himself go, when he felt like it.
His most fully realized project remains In the American West, made between 1979 and 1984 for the Amon Carter Museum in Texas. He crossed the American West, far from western mythology and postcard landscapes: ranches, rodeos, jails, isolated truck stops, mines, slaughterhouses, mental hospitals, stockyards. Seven hundred fifty-two sittings, one hundred eighty-nine towns, seventeen states. He photographed oil workers, drifters, waitresses, miners, always in his grammar of white background and frontality, but applied this time to nobodies, to people no one else thought to portray with such care. He admitted the fiction at the heart of the project himself: “This is a fictional West. I don’t think the West of these portraits is any more conclusive than the West of John Wayne.” He never claimed to be doing documentary work. He was manufacturing an opinion, and owning it as one.
In 1978, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York gave him a major retrospective, Avedon: Photographs 1947-1977, showing two hundred large-format prints. It was an event. No fashion photographer had ever received such an honor from so conservative an institution, and the controversy surrounding the show only confirmed the place he had by then earned, straddling commerce and art, magazine and museum.
He died on October 1, 2004, at eighty-one, of a cerebral hemorrhage in San Antonio, Texas, while on assignment for The New Yorker. He had been working on Democracy, a series of portraits built around that year’s American presidential campaign, which the magazine would publish before the election as a posthumous tribute. To the very end, he was photographing power and its faces, as he had done all his life.
One thing strikes me, looking at his body of work in order, from Dovima to Marilyn Monroe, from Kissinger to an anonymous farmhand in Texas: Avedon applies the same rule every time, that same refusal to let anyone hide. The white background isn’t just an aesthetic choice. It’s a statement of principle, from a man for whom photography wasn’t testimony, but judgment, a confession pulled out of someone by force. His fashion images are probably the most seductive of his century. But it’s his portraits that tell the truest things, often more about him than about the people he photographed, as he was happy to admit. What I take from him most, as a photographer, is that total discipline. He never needed a set to tell a story. Just a face, flat light, and the nerve to keep looking until something gives way.
Grégory Herpe
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