Richard Avedon

We have one object that Richard Avedon was involved with somehow.

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  please don't steal our pictures, yeah?
  Poster, "John Lennon", 1967 This object's accession number is 1981-29-511 and is dated 1967 This is from the Drawings, Prints, and Graphic Design department This object was designed by Richard Avedon

  
  

Wikipedia

Richard Avedon (May 15, 1923 – October 1, 2004) was an American photographer. An obituary published in The New York Times said that "his fashion and portrait photographs helped define America's image of style, beauty and culture for the last half-century."

Early life and education

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Avedon was born in New York City to a Jewish Russian family. He was the only son of Jacob Israel Avedon, a Russian-Jewish immigrant who started a successful retail dress business on Fifth Avenue, and his wife Anna, who came from a family that owned a dress manufacturing business. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, where he worked on the school paper The Magpie with James Baldwin from 1937 until 1940. After briefly attending Columbia University, he started as a photographer for the Merchant Marines in 1942, taking identification pictures of the crewmen with his Rolleiflex camera given to him by his father as a going-away present. From 1944 to 1950, he studied with Alexey Brodovitch at his Design Laboratory at the New School for Social Research.

Photography career

In 1944, Avedon began working as an advertising photographer for a department store, but was quickly discovered by Alexey Brodovitch, the art director for the fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar. Lillian Bassman also promoted Avedon's career at Harper's. In 1945 his photographs began appearing in Junior Bazaar and, a year later, in Bazaar itself.

In 1946, Avedon had set up his own studio and began providing images for magazines including Vogue and Life. He soon became the chief photographer for Harper's Bazaar. From 1950 he also contributed photographs to Life, Look and Graphis and in 1952 became Staff Editor and photographer for Theatre Arts Magazine. Avedon did not conform to the standard technique of taking fashion photographs, where models stood emotionless and seemingly indifferent to the camera. Instead, Avedon showed models full of emotion, smiling, laughing, and, many times, in action. Towards the end of the 1950s he became dissatisfied with daylight photography and open air locations and so turned to studio photography, using strobe lighting.

When Diana Vreeland left Harper's Bazaar for Vogue magazine in 1966, Avedon joined her as a staff photographer. He proceeded to become the lead photographer of Vogue and photographed most of the covers from 1973 until Anna Wintour became editor in chief in late 1988. Notable among his fashion advertisement photograph series are the recurring assignments for Gianni Versace, starting from the spring/summer campaign 1980. He also photographed the Calvin Klein Jeans campaign featuring a fifteen year old Brooke Shields, as well as directing her in the television commercials. Avedon first worked with Shields in 1974 for a Colgate toothpaste ad. He shot her for Versace, 12 American Vogue covers and Revlon's Most Unforgettable Women campaign. In the February 9, 1981 issue of Newsweek, Avedon said that "Brooke is a lightning rod. She focuses the inarticulate rage people feel about the decline in contemporary morality and destruction of innocence in the world." On working with Avedon, Shields told Interview magazine in May 1992 "When Dick walks into the room, a lot of people are intimidated. But when he works, he's so acutely creative, so sensitive. And he doesn't like it if anyone else is around or speaking. There is a mutual vulnerability, and a moment of fusion when he clicks the shutter. You either get it or you don't".

In addition to his continuing fashion work, by the 1960s Avedon had turned his energies toward making studio portraits of civil rights workers, politicians and cultural dissidents of various stripes in an America fissured by discord and violence. He began to branch out and photographed patients of mental hospitals, the Civil Rights Movement in 1963, protesters of the Vietnam War, and later the fall of the Berlin Wall. An exceedingly personal book called “Nothing Personal,” with a text by his high school classmate James Baldwin appeared in 1964. During this period, Avedon also created two famous sets of portraits of The Beatles. The first, taken in mid to late 1967, became one of the first major rock poster series, and consisted of five striking psychedelic portraits of the group — four heavily solarized individual color portraits (solarisation of prints by his assistant, Gideon Lewin, retouching by Bob Bishop) and a black-and-white group portrait taken with a Rolleiflex camera and a normal Planar lens. The next year he photographed the much more restrained portraits that were included with The Beatles in 1968. Among the many other rock bands photographed by Avedon, in 1973 he shot Electric Light Orchestra with all the members exposing their bellybuttons for recording, On the Third Day.

Avedon was always interested in how portraiture captures the personality and soul of its subject. As his reputation as a photographer became widely known, he brought in many famous faces to his studio and photographed them with a large-format 8x10 view camera. His subjects include Buster Keaton, Marian Anderson, Marilyn Monroe, Ezra Pound, Isak Dinesen, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Andy Warhol, and the Chicago Seven. His portraits are easily distinguished by their minimalist style, where the person is looking squarely in the camera, posed in front of a sheer white background. Avedon would at times evoke reactions from his portrait subjects by guiding them into uncomfortable areas of discussion or asking them psychologically probing questions. Through these means he would produce images revealing aspects of his subject's character and personality that were not typically captured by others.

He is also distinguished by his large prints, sometimes measuring over three feet in height. His large-format portrait work of drifters, miners, cowboys and others from the western United States became a best-selling book and traveling exhibit entitled In the American West, and is regarded as an important hallmark in 20th century portrait photography, and by some as Avedon's magnum opus. Commissioned by the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, it was a six-year project Avedon embarked on in 1979, that produced 125 portraits of people in the American west who caught Avedon's eye. His mural groupings featured emblematic figures: Andy Warhol with the players and stars of The Factory; The Chicago Seven, political radicals charged with conspiracy to incite riot at the 1968 Democratic National Convention; the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and his extended family; and the Mission Council, a group of military and government officials who governed the United States' participation in the Vietnam War.

Avedon was drawn to working people such as miners and oil field workers in their soiled work clothes, unemployed drifters, and teenagers growing up in the West circa 1979-84. When first published and exhibited, In the American West was criticized for showing what some considered to be a disparaging view of America. Avedon was also lauded for treating his subjects with the attention and dignity usually reserved for the politically powerful and celebrities. Laura Wilson served as Avedon's assistant during the creation of In the American West and in 2003 published a photo book documenting the experiences, Avedon at Work, In the American West.

In 1982 Avedon produced a playfully inventive series of advertisements for fashion label 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 on a couch.

Avedon became the first staff photographer for The New Yorker in 1992, where his post-apocalyptic, wild fashion fable “In Memory of the Late Mr. and Mrs. Comfort,” featuring model Nadja Auermann and a skeleton, was published in 1995. Other pictures for the magazine, ranging from the first publication, in 1994, of previously unpublished photos of Marilyn Monroe to a resonant rendering of Christopher Reeve in his wheelchair and nude photographs of Charlize Theron in 2004, were topics of wide discussion. Some of his less controversial New Yorker portraits include those of Saul Bellow, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Toni Morrison, Derek Walcott, John Kerry, and Stephen Sondheim. In his later years, he continued to contribute to Egoïste, where his photographs appeared from 1984 through 2000. In 1999, Avedon shot the cover photos for Japanese-American singer Hikaru Utada's Addicted to You.

He was awarded The Royal Photographic Society's Special 150th Anniversary Medal and Honorary Fellowship (HonFRPS) in recognition of a sustained, significant contribution to the art of photography in 2003.

Exhibitions

Avedon had numerous museum exhibitions around the world. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, presented two solo exhibitions during his lifetime, in 1978 and 2002. In 1980 another retrospective was organized by the University Art Museum in Berkeley. Major retrospectives were mounted at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1994), and at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humblebaek, Denmark (2007; traveled to Milan, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam and San Francisco, through 2009). Showing Avedon's work from his earliest, sun-splashed pictures in 1944 to portraits in 2000 that convey his fashion fatigue, the International Center of Photography in 2009 mounted the largest survey of the photographer's fashion work. Also in 2009, the Corcoran Gallery of Art showed "Richard Avedon: Portraits of Power", bringing together the photographer's political portraits for the first time.

Collections

Avedon's work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.; Amon Carter Museum, Ft. Worth, Texas; and Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, among many other museums and institutions worldwide.

Recognition

Avedon won many awards for his photography, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 1989, the International Center of Photography Master of Photography Award in 1993, the Prix Nadar in 1994 for his photobook Evidence, the Royal Photographic Society 150th Anniversary Medal as well as the National Arts Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2003. He received honorary graduate degrees from the Royal College of Art (1989), Kenyon College (1993) and Parsons School of Design (1994), and was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001.

Art market

In 2010, a record price of £719,000 was achieved at Christie's for a unique seven foot high print of model Dovima, posing in a Christian Dior evening dress with elephants from the Cirque d’Hiver, Paris, in 1955. This particular print, the largest of this image, was made in 1978 for Avedon’s fashion retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and was bought by Maison Christian Dior.

Gagosian Gallery announced its worldwide representation of Avedon in 2011.

Legacy

The Richard Avedon Foundation is private operating foundation, structured by Avedon during his lifetime. It began its work shortly after his death in 2004. Based in New York, the foundation is the repository for Avedon's photographs, negatives, publications, papers, and archival materials. In 2006, Avedon's personal collection was shown at the Pace/MacGill Gallery, New York, and at the Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, and later sold to benefit the Avedon Foundation. The collection included photographs by Martin Munkacsi, Edward Steichen, and Man Ray, among others. A slender volume, “Eye of the Beholder: Photographs From the Collection of Richard Avedon” (Fraenkel Gallery), assembles the majority of the collection in a boxed set of five booklets: “Diane Arbus,” “Peter Hujar”, “Irving Penn”, “The Countess de Castiglione” and “Etcetera,” which includes 19th- and 20th-century photographers.

Personal life

In 1944, Avedon married Dorcas Marie Nowell (1925—2011); she became the model and actress Doe Avedon; they divorced after five years of marriage. In 1951, he married Evelyn Franklin; she died on March 13, 2004. Their marriage produced one son, John Avedon, an author and authority on Tibet.

In 1970, Avedon purchased a former carriage house on the Upper East Side that would serve as both his studio and his apartment. In the late 1970s, he purchased a four-bedroom house on a 7.5-acre estate in Montauk, nestled between the Atlantic Ocean and a nature preserve; in 1998, he put the place on the market for $10 million and sold it for almost $9 million in 2000.

On October 1, 2004, Avedon died of a brain hemorrhage in San Antonio, Texas, while shooting an assignment for The New Yorker. At the time of his death, he was also working on a new project titled Democracy to focus on the run-up to the 2004 U.S. presidential election.

Avedon is survived by his son John, and his four grandchildren William, Matthew, Michael and Caroline.

Funny Face

Hollywood presented a fictional account of his early career in the 1957 musical Funny Face, starring Fred Astaire as the fashion photographer "Dick Avery." Avedon supplied some of the still photographs used in the production, including its most famous single image: an intentionally overexposed close-up of Audrey Hepburn's face in which only her famous features - her eyes, her eyebrows, and her mouth - are visible.

Hepburn was Avedon's muse in the 1950s and 1960s, and he went so far as to say "I am, and forever will be, devastated by the gift of Audrey Hepburn before my camera. I cannot lift her to greater heights. She is already there. I can only record. I cannot interpret her. There is no going further than who she is. She has achieved in herself her ultimate portrait."

Famous photographs

• Marella Agnelli, Italian socialite, 1953
• Carmen Mayrink Veiga, Brazilian socialite (Vogue's 10 best dressed), 1970
• Dovima with Elephants, 1955
• Marilyn Monroe, actress, 1957
• Homage to Munkacsi, Carmen, coat by Cardin, Paris 1957
• Christina Bellin, model, 1962
• Dwight David Eisenhower, President of the United States, 1964
• The Beatles, 1967
• Andy Warhol and Members of the Factory, New York 1969
• Sly Stone (cover of Fresh Album), 1973
• Asha Puthli (She Loves to Hear the Music Album back cover), 1974
• Ronald Fischer, beekeeper, 1981
• Nastassja Kinski and the Serpent, 1981
• Pile of beautiful people, Versace campaign 1982.

Books by Richard Avedon

• Observations, 1959. A collaborative book with Truman Capote containing portraits of many famous people of the twentieth century, including Pablo Picasso, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Mae West.
• Nothing Personal, 1964. A collaborative book with James Baldwin.
• Alice in Wonderland, 1973, co-authored with Doon Arbus.
• Portraits, 1976
• Portraits 1947-1977, 1978
• In the American West, 1985
• An Autobiography, 1993. Contains 50 years of images arranged to tell Avedon's life story. Photos include celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Andy Warhol, and Avedon's parents.
• Evidence, 1994. More than 600 images encompassing Avedon's fashion photographs, portraiture, journalistic shots, sketches, snapshots, and contact sheets. However, despite containing many images, the book focuses more on the essays and text about Avedon instead of being fully based on visuals.
• The Sixties, 1999, co-authored with Doon Arbus. Contains images of many famous figures such as Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Twiggy.
• Made in France, 2001. A retrospective of Avedon's fashion portraiture from the 1950s. The book is expensive due to the images being printed on tritone plates.
• Richard Avedon Portraits' 2002. 50 black and white images of celebrities and subjects from his In The American West project. Its release coincided with an exhibition of the work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
• Woman in the Mirror. 2005, with an essay by Anne Hollander.
• Performance. 2008, with an essay by John Lahr.
• Portraits of Power. 2008, edited by Paul Roth with an essay by Renata Adler. Coincides with an exhibition of political work at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington DC.

References

External links

• Official website
• Richard Avedon at Encyclopædia Britannica
• Richard Avedon at the Museum of Modern Art
• Richard Avedon at Find a Grave
• Richard Avedon: Portrait Series of Jacob Israel Avedon from the Collection of The Jewish Museum (New York)

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