TamTam Books News Monday, October 04, 2004: Richard Avedon died. That's a drag. In fact that this year lost three great photographers is pretty bad year: Here's the obit from (guess what?) the Guradian: Obituary ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Richard Avedon Master photographer who captured the conflicting identities of America Amanda Hopkinson Saturday October 2, 2004 The Guardian The career of the photographer Richard Avedon, who has died aged 81, was called by Susan Sontag "one of the exemplary photographic careers of this century" - alongside Edward Steichen, Bill Brandt and Henri Cartier-Bresson. He himself had no dearth of famous names in the fields of both photography and literature to accompany his volumes of images: from Mark Haworth-Booth and Harold Rosenberg, James Baldwin and Truman Capote to Arthur Miller and George Wallace. Avedon was born in New York; his father owned a shop on Fifth Avenue. At 12 years old, he joined the YMHA camera club - an early photograph shows him with his Kodak Box Brownie in Central Park in 1935. He attended DeWitt Clinton high school in the Bronx, where he was co-editor, with James Baldwin, of the Magpie, the school's literary magazine, and became poet laureate of New York high schools. From the start - after war service in the photography section of the US merchant marines - Avedon was linked to fashion, fashion magazines and Irving Penn. Never more so than in Helmut Gernsheim's oft-reiterated comments of their "creation of a contemporary style", utilising "the same strength" of assigning "monumentality" to their subjects. But whereas Penn might go for the oddest juxtapositions - like an evening dress and an elephant, or turn South Sea islanders in warrior armour into fashion plates - Avedon eschewed anything that might intervene in the arresting clarity and deceptive simplicity of the early portraits. Attached, aged only 21, to Harper's Bazaar, he had established his own studio a year later. His studies at New York's New School for Social Research, under the legendary Alexei Brodovitch (where Diane Arbus and Eve Arnold, among others, also trained), led directly to his appointment as a staffer on Harper's, where Brodovitch and Carmel Snow were commissioning editors. He stayed from 1945 to 1965, before branching out into Vogue, working under Diana Vreeland and Alexander Liberman (from 1966), and at the New Yorker, where, in 1992, he became the magazine's first staff photographer. It was the glossy, east-coast magazines which provided the skeleton on which all the other myriad Avedon projects were fleshed. Partly, perhaps, a question of being in the right place at the right time: one could not invent a more appropriate outlet for the stark, but often naturally lit, portraits of models, artists, the famous and the infamous. Despite Avedon's protestations against daylight, he had an even greater resistance to shadows - including those backdrop rims thrown up by flash. Something of the extraordinary print quality of those large-format black-and-white investigations has to be due to Avedon's printers, especially Earl Steinbicken. Avedon's own interest was always in the people, never in the fashions. In fact, the models tended to add a layer of complication to what he fundamentally believed was the relationship between photographer and sitter. As he said: "A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he (sic) is 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." In the case of the model, of course, she was performing as a clothes horse, wearing the outfits and makeup assigned, and not necessarily presenting herself as she might choose. Yet it was Avedon's conviction that "We all perform" - with its necessary corollary that "I trust performances" - that allowed both for the model's interpretation, actor-like, of a given role, and his own refusal to distinguish between "the named and unnamed" (in New Yorker terms, the famous and the rest). Initially inspired by the 1930s imagery of the great Hungarian Martin Munkacsi, who photographed fashions as if they were battleships, Avedon democratised the image, at least partly by removing it from its setting. (Even the portrait of Red Owens, Oil Field Worker, Oklahoma, 1980 has the raggedy-overalled, bearded stevedore doused in black viscosity aqainst a bare white backcloth.) Many photographs also include the dark border running around the rim of the square-format negative, as though proclaiming "right, now you don't need to frame me any other than how the photographer did". And many of his exhibitions, including the major retrospective which travelled to the National Portrait Gallery in London in 1994-95 followed that line. The exercise in democratising the image paradoxically had its own fiercely political implications. Avedon protested too much in insisting that he concentrated on surfaces because that was where his faith lay. By concentrating on the great unnamed of the United States, he gave us In The American West (1985, in which Red Owens appeared), about as different from Robert Frank's Americans as any study could be. By using a traditional Hasselblad and homing in on every detail, he rendered his subjects again as much a set of graphic compositions as he did his fashion models in their swirling dresses. The paradox lies in his own assertion that the moment an emotion enters into a portrait, it becomes less a statement of fact than of opinion. This puts the onus of response from the photographer on to the viewer. A wide-angle lens, used in closeup, enhanced the sense of distortion, magnifying minor defects, sometimes horrifying the viewer. Twenty years earlier, the initially shocking, but ultimately sentimental tome Nothing Personal (1964), opened with a foggy double-spread frontispiece of a man, wearing only trunks, spectacles and a wristwatch, kneeling before an elaborate sandcastle. It closes with even softer-washed portraits of a loving couple, the woman heavily pregnant, cavorting in the sea-shallows, and of a man holding his infant up out of the water balanced on the palm of his hand. Between the two there are posed versions of numerous rites of passage. That Penguin Books would have even considered doing as unconventional and giant a volume as this testified to Avedon's clout. The text was by James Baldwin, who wrote that "the myth tells us that America was full of smiling people ... the relevant truth is that the country was settled by a desperate, divided, and rapacious horde of people who were determined to forget their pasts and determined to make money. We certainly have not changed in this respect, and this is proved by our faces, by our children, by our absolutely unspeakable loneliness, and the spectacular ugliness and hostility of our cities." Avedon just focused on the faces. In 1976, he devised a Who's Who Of America in the run-up to the presidential elections. Sixty-nine members of The Family - those with the intellectual, economic and political power - appeared in Rolling Stone. They did not present pretty pictures and Avedon himself reacted with characteristic self-negation: "I strongly voice my emotions in my photographs ... this is a composite portrait of the power elite, but I feel nothing at all for the majority of these people." He goes further, denying not only any personal responses, but any political or moral ones by adding, "I'm not looking to offset Republicans against Democrats, good against bad." His goal was to reverse the tradition, voiced by Julia Margaret Cameron, of using portraiture to allow the outer form to reveal the inner spirit. Avedon was in search of the inner spirit alright, but was hijacking the former preserve of the postwar humanist photographic tradition, in searching for something generic outside of their established domain of street photography. Even the images which most promote the child-as-father-to-the-man in the opening and closing shots of the deliberately named Nothing Personal are non-specifically misty. His defence, in the face of concerted attack for the series on his cancer-stricken father (1969-73), was that it was not the death scenes of Jacob Israel Avedon but rather of everyman. Last month, Avedon suffered a stroke while taking pictures in San Antonio, Texas, for a piece for the New Yorker called "On Democracy". He was married twice. His first marriage was to Dorcas in 1944; he married Evelyn in 1951, with whom he had one son. · Richard Avedon, photographer, born May 15 1923; died October 1 2004 Tosh // 11:00 PM ______________________ Comments: Post a Comment
Richard Avedon died. That's a drag. In fact that this year lost three great photographers is pretty bad year: Here's the obit from (guess what?) the Guradian: Obituary ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Richard Avedon Master photographer who captured the conflicting identities of America Amanda Hopkinson Saturday October 2, 2004 The Guardian The career of the photographer Richard Avedon, who has died aged 81, was called by Susan Sontag "one of the exemplary photographic careers of this century" - alongside Edward Steichen, Bill Brandt and Henri Cartier-Bresson. He himself had no dearth of famous names in the fields of both photography and literature to accompany his volumes of images: from Mark Haworth-Booth and Harold Rosenberg, James Baldwin and Truman Capote to Arthur Miller and George Wallace. Avedon was born in New York; his father owned a shop on Fifth Avenue. At 12 years old, he joined the YMHA camera club - an early photograph shows him with his Kodak Box Brownie in Central Park in 1935. He attended DeWitt Clinton high school in the Bronx, where he was co-editor, with James Baldwin, of the Magpie, the school's literary magazine, and became poet laureate of New York high schools. From the start - after war service in the photography section of the US merchant marines - Avedon was linked to fashion, fashion magazines and Irving Penn. Never more so than in Helmut Gernsheim's oft-reiterated comments of their "creation of a contemporary style", utilising "the same strength" of assigning "monumentality" to their subjects. But whereas Penn might go for the oddest juxtapositions - like an evening dress and an elephant, or turn South Sea islanders in warrior armour into fashion plates - Avedon eschewed anything that might intervene in the arresting clarity and deceptive simplicity of the early portraits. Attached, aged only 21, to Harper's Bazaar, he had established his own studio a year later. His studies at New York's New School for Social Research, under the legendary Alexei Brodovitch (where Diane Arbus and Eve Arnold, among others, also trained), led directly to his appointment as a staffer on Harper's, where Brodovitch and Carmel Snow were commissioning editors. He stayed from 1945 to 1965, before branching out into Vogue, working under Diana Vreeland and Alexander Liberman (from 1966), and at the New Yorker, where, in 1992, he became the magazine's first staff photographer. It was the glossy, east-coast magazines which provided the skeleton on which all the other myriad Avedon projects were fleshed. Partly, perhaps, a question of being in the right place at the right time: one could not invent a more appropriate outlet for the stark, but often naturally lit, portraits of models, artists, the famous and the infamous. Despite Avedon's protestations against daylight, he had an even greater resistance to shadows - including those backdrop rims thrown up by flash. Something of the extraordinary print quality of those large-format black-and-white investigations has to be due to Avedon's printers, especially Earl Steinbicken. Avedon's own interest was always in the people, never in the fashions. In fact, the models tended to add a layer of complication to what he fundamentally believed was the relationship between photographer and sitter. As he said: "A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he (sic) is 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." In the case of the model, of course, she was performing as a clothes horse, wearing the outfits and makeup assigned, and not necessarily presenting herself as she might choose. Yet it was Avedon's conviction that "We all perform" - with its necessary corollary that "I trust performances" - that allowed both for the model's interpretation, actor-like, of a given role, and his own refusal to distinguish between "the named and unnamed" (in New Yorker terms, the famous and the rest). Initially inspired by the 1930s imagery of the great Hungarian Martin Munkacsi, who photographed fashions as if they were battleships, Avedon democratised the image, at least partly by removing it from its setting. (Even the portrait of Red Owens, Oil Field Worker, Oklahoma, 1980 has the raggedy-overalled, bearded stevedore doused in black viscosity aqainst a bare white backcloth.) Many photographs also include the dark border running around the rim of the square-format negative, as though proclaiming "right, now you don't need to frame me any other than how the photographer did". And many of his exhibitions, including the major retrospective which travelled to the National Portrait Gallery in London in 1994-95 followed that line. The exercise in democratising the image paradoxically had its own fiercely political implications. Avedon protested too much in insisting that he concentrated on surfaces because that was where his faith lay. By concentrating on the great unnamed of the United States, he gave us In The American West (1985, in which Red Owens appeared), about as different from Robert Frank's Americans as any study could be. By using a traditional Hasselblad and homing in on every detail, he rendered his subjects again as much a set of graphic compositions as he did his fashion models in their swirling dresses. The paradox lies in his own assertion that the moment an emotion enters into a portrait, it becomes less a statement of fact than of opinion. This puts the onus of response from the photographer on to the viewer. A wide-angle lens, used in closeup, enhanced the sense of distortion, magnifying minor defects, sometimes horrifying the viewer. Twenty years earlier, the initially shocking, but ultimately sentimental tome Nothing Personal (1964), opened with a foggy double-spread frontispiece of a man, wearing only trunks, spectacles and a wristwatch, kneeling before an elaborate sandcastle. It closes with even softer-washed portraits of a loving couple, the woman heavily pregnant, cavorting in the sea-shallows, and of a man holding his infant up out of the water balanced on the palm of his hand. Between the two there are posed versions of numerous rites of passage. That Penguin Books would have even considered doing as unconventional and giant a volume as this testified to Avedon's clout. The text was by James Baldwin, who wrote that "the myth tells us that America was full of smiling people ... the relevant truth is that the country was settled by a desperate, divided, and rapacious horde of people who were determined to forget their pasts and determined to make money. We certainly have not changed in this respect, and this is proved by our faces, by our children, by our absolutely unspeakable loneliness, and the spectacular ugliness and hostility of our cities." Avedon just focused on the faces. In 1976, he devised a Who's Who Of America in the run-up to the presidential elections. Sixty-nine members of The Family - those with the intellectual, economic and political power - appeared in Rolling Stone. They did not present pretty pictures and Avedon himself reacted with characteristic self-negation: "I strongly voice my emotions in my photographs ... this is a composite portrait of the power elite, but I feel nothing at all for the majority of these people." He goes further, denying not only any personal responses, but any political or moral ones by adding, "I'm not looking to offset Republicans against Democrats, good against bad." His goal was to reverse the tradition, voiced by Julia Margaret Cameron, of using portraiture to allow the outer form to reveal the inner spirit. Avedon was in search of the inner spirit alright, but was hijacking the former preserve of the postwar humanist photographic tradition, in searching for something generic outside of their established domain of street photography. Even the images which most promote the child-as-father-to-the-man in the opening and closing shots of the deliberately named Nothing Personal are non-specifically misty. His defence, in the face of concerted attack for the series on his cancer-stricken father (1969-73), was that it was not the death scenes of Jacob Israel Avedon but rather of everyman. Last month, Avedon suffered a stroke while taking pictures in San Antonio, Texas, for a piece for the New Yorker called "On Democracy". He was married twice. His first marriage was to Dorcas in 1944; he married Evelyn in 1951, with whom he had one son. · Richard Avedon, photographer, born May 15 1923; died October 1 2004 Tosh // 11:00 PM
