AVEDON, RICHARD

AVEDON, RICHARD (1923–2004), U.S. photographer. Born in New York City, the son of a Russian-Jewish immigrant, Avedon carved out a long and successful career as a photographer of fashion models and celebrities, becoming the first staff photographer of the influential magazine the New Yorker, in 1992. He studied philosophy at Columbia University in 1941–42, before entering the U.S. Merchant Marine during World War II, where he served in the photography section until 1944. He studied photography in New York at the New School for Social Research, where one of his teachers was Alexey Brodovitch, the influential art director of Harper's Bazaar magazine. Avedon became Brodovitch's protégé, and he made his first photographs for the fashion magazine at 21.   In 1946 he established the Richard Avedon Studio in New York. He remained a staff photographer for Harper's Bazaar until 1966, during which time his fresh energetic photographs created a "democratic" vision of high fashion, with his models, often clothed by Dior, strolling down the streets of Paris and chatting with shopkeepers and street performers. He virtually reinvented portraiture as a photographic genre, making arresting, though not always flattering, images of the country's cultural elite (artists, fashion designers, writers, actors) and culturally destitute (drifters and carnival workers he photographed in the western United States in the early 1980s). Posing his subjects against empty white backdrops and removing the descriptive devices of setting and props, Avedon called attention to the subject's gesture and expression, to the drama and psychology revealed in that person's gaze or the lines of his or her face. He worked as an advertising photographer, director, and visual consultant for film and television. One of his most famous fashion photographs, made in 1995 in Paris, shows the then famous model Dovina, in a gown by Dior, before several live elephants. The 1957 film Funny Face, with Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn, was loosely based on his life. In 1959 Avedon's first book of photographs, designed by Brodovitch, with a text by Truman Capote, was published under the title Observations. He joined Vogue, a rival fashion magazine to Harper's Bazaar, in 1966. Traveling widely, Avedon produced several notable bodies of work. In 1963 he went to the American South and photographed the civil rights movement, collaborating with James Baldwin on the book Nothing Personal. In the late 1960s and 1970s he photographed antiwar demonstrators, and in 1971 he went to Vietnam to document military leaders and war victims. From 1985 to 1992 his editorial work appeared exclusively in Egoiste, the French literary and art magazine. His work is in the permanent collections of major museums, and he has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, including a display of his fashion photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1978. He was also the recipient of numerous honors, including an honorary doctorate from London's Royal College of Art in 1989, the International Photography Prize from the Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation in 1991, and the Master of Photography Award from the International Center of Photography in 1993, the year his book, An Autobiography, was published. "A portrait is not a likeness," Avedon said. "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." Avedon once described himself as "completely agnostic, someone who doesn't believe in anything." John Avedon, his son, described his father in a film about him, similarly, and with affection and a bit of humor. "My father, who has absolutely no religious sentiment of any kind, and has no cultural sentiment in terms of Jewish culture, has a very standard Jewish personality, if that's not too big a generalization to make. And by that I mean he thrives on anxiety. It's a way of life." In Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light, a documentary produced in 1995, Avedon, who considered himself unequivocally secular, said his Jewishness was "connected to something pure in the genes, something in me that was a Jew." He tells of an intimate revelation with his experience of touching an ancient Torah in a synagogue in Europe. "I was shaking," he said. "I can't explain it." (Stewart Kampel (2nd ed.)