Obituary: Richard Avedon / Photographer whose portraits captured models' inner world
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Richard Avedon, who during a career spanning more than 50 years was renowned both for his stripped-down black-and-white portrait photography and his playful yet sophisticated fashion shots, died yesterday. Mr. Avedon, who was 81, died at Methodist Hospital in San Antonio, Texas, of a blood clot in the brain, according to his son, John.
Kathy Willens, Associated PressPhotographer Richard Avedon, seen with his self-portraits that were part of the exhibit "Richard Avedon: Portraits" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2002, died Friday. He was 81.
Click photo for larger image.
Mr. Avedon had been on assignment in Texas for the New Yorker magazine completing a project called "On Democracy," a portfolio about politics in America. David Remnick, editor of the magazine, said he plans to publish the work before the Nov. 2 presidential election.
As a fashion photographer, Mr. Avedon was among the first to replace the statuesque poses of the past with vivacious action scenes that commanded the pages of Harper's Bazaar and Vogue magazines from the mid-1940s through the 1980s. His models nuzzled elephants in Egypt, hugged sweaty cyclists on the Champs-Elysee in Paris and leaped like gymnasts through his New York City studio.
But increasingly he preferred making portraits of public figures, capturing their inner worlds rather than romanticizing their lifestyles. By eschewing soft lights and cluttered props, he took a stark, often harsh look at his subjects. Many of the photographs taken later in his life were done for the New Yorker, which ran his portraits of people in the arts and politics as a weekly feature starting in 1992.
"Avedon gave us the pared-down study of the famous person, a stripped-away look at their humanity," said Arthur Ollman, director of the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. "It is portraiture as interrogation."
Actors, presidents, writers and social activists stood against a blank white background "as if he had pinned them to a wall like a specimen," Ollman said of Mr. Avedon's style. The results could be cold and critical. And yet, Ollman said, "being photographed by Avedon meant you'd made it."
Marilyn Monroe, dressed in sequins and diamonds, appears to be a bit frightened before Mr. Avedon's camera. President Ford squints warily in a 1976 portrait that suggests an honest if uninspired CEO. Playwright Samuel Beckett, facial lines as deep as tractor tracks, gazes into the camera, seemingly at peace with his demons.
Mr. Avedon once described what he saw in many of the famous faces he photographed.
"People -- running from unhappiness, hiding in power -- are locked within their reputations, ambitions, beliefs," he wrote in "An Autobiography, Richard Avedon" (1993) about his portraits of such tenacious survivors as Kennedy family matriarch Rose Kennedy, writer Truman Capote and pianist/raconteur Oscar Levant.
Other images in the book -- of war victims and mental patients -- spoke to a different kind of portrait. "People, unprotected by their roles, become isolated in beauty and intellect and illness and confusion," he wrote.
Mr. Avedon found his means of artistic expression early and was among the first to adapt it to larger-than-life-sized portraits -- 4-by-6-feet images in the late 1950s, 10-by-30-feet or more in the '60s.
"In art, the monumental size generally had been reserved for gods and presidents," Robert Sobieszek, curator of photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, said yesterday. "Avedon applied it to everyone, from Andy Warhol to ordinary workers in the American West. What he pulled off was the democratization of the photographic image."
He was attracted to stylish rebels. College student Julian Bond and other civil rights activists stand in formation like an army before Avedon's camera; Warhol and his entourage amble across a three-panel mural; the bearded, bell-bottomed "Chicago Seven" antiwar activists -- including Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Tom Hayden -- look ready to rap.
"Avedon's photographs are unrivaled as documents of our time," said Mia Fineman, research associate of the photography department of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. "He created an encyclopedia of the key players in the counterculture, the intellectual culture, politics and the arts."
"With Dick Avedon you always knew you were looking at a fashion photograph," said Grace Mirabella, who was editor of Vogue at the time the photographer landed a record $1 million annual contract there in 1966. "He never tried to forsake style for a strong image."
He did, however, fight for control of his work, battling with several generations of fashion magazine editors. While few magazine editors or art directors who worked with him wanted to be quoted, many said he could be extremely difficult.
"His ego is so overblown. He is self-centered to a fault. He loves his own work to the exclusion of all others," one of them told People magazine in 1994.
First Published October 2, 2004 12:00 am
