“All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.”
–Richard Avedon

Richard Avedon is one of the most well known portrait and fashion photographers around. For over fifty years, his portraits have filled the pages of the worlds finest magazines. His stark imagery and brilliant insight into his subject’s characters made him one of the premier American portrait photographers.


Avedon was born in 1923. A high school drop out, he joined the Merchant marine’s photographic section. In 1944, he found a job as a photographer in a department store where he was found by an art director at Harper’s Bazaar and was soon producing for them as well as Vogue, Look, and many other magazines. Avedon made most of his earnings through advertising, but his real passion was portraiture and its ability to express the essence of it’s subject.
As Avedon’s notoriety grew, so did the opportunities to meet and photograph celebrities from a broad range of disciplines. Avedon’s gift of capturing the essence of his subjects was recognized by the public as well as the celebrities he photographed. The normally distant and inaccessible celebrities were now being shown with a sense of intimacy that neither celebrity or public were used to. Many sought out Avedon for their most public images, as his artistic style brought a sense of sophistication and authority to the portraits. It was Avedon’s ability to set his subjects at ease that helps him create true, intimate, and lasting photographs.
Avedon never lost his unique style, which was famous for it’s minimalism. His portraits were often well lit and in front of white backdrops. When printed, the images regularly contained the dark outline of the film in which the image was framed. Within the minimalism of his empty studio, Avedon’s subjects move freely, and it is this movement which brings a sense of spontaneity to the images. His portraits usually only contain a portion of the subject, the images seem intimate in their imperfections. Many photographers try to catch a moment in time or prepare a for a formal image, why Avedon is so successful is because he has found a way to combine the two.


Avedon also collaborated in portrait books. In 1959, he worked with Truman Capote on a book that documented some of the most famous and important people of the century. At the same time, he created a series of images of patients in mental hospitals. He replaced the environment of his studio with the hospital, and he was able to recreate the same intimate images with non-celebrities. He also did a series of studio images of drifters, carnival workers, and working class Americans.


Throughout the 1960s Avedon continued to work for Harper’s Bazaar and in 1974 he collaborated with James Baldwin on the book Nothing Personal. Having met in New York in 1943, Baldwin and Avedon were friends and collaborators for more than thirty years. For all of the 1970s and 1980s Avedon continued working for Vogue magazine, where he would take some of the most famous portraits of the decades. In 1992 he became the first staff photographer for The New Yorker, and two years later the Whitney Museum brought together fifty years of his work in the retrospective, “Richard Avedon: Evidence”. He was voted one of the ten greatest photographers in the world by Popular Photography magazine, and in 1989 received an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art in London. Today, his pictures continue to bring us a closer, more intimate view of the great and the famous.
Avedon died on October 1st, 2004.

Labels: fashion photography, portraits, Richard Avedon