Richard Avedon, the portrait laid bare
« American photographer (1923-2004), who raised fashion and author portraiture to an unmatched standard. »
Born in New York in 1923, Avedon joined Harper's Bazaar in 1944, then Vogue in 1965. He revolutionised fashion photography by taking models out of the studio: Dovima with Elephants (Cirque d'Hiver, 1955), street running, flash leaps. Movement, laughter, sweat — fashion became cinema.
But it is his portrait work that defines the century. White seamless, neutral light, 8x10 view camera, subject staring at the lens: no escape. His series In the American West (1979-1984) — miners, the unemployed, children — confronted the country's mythic self-image with real faces, unsparing and uncompromising.
Henry Kissinger, the Beatles, Marilyn drained, his dying father: Avedon photographed everyone the same way. The technique stayed constant; only the subject changed. A radical economy that made the portrait, in his words, "the feeling of someone you hold in your hands."