during the second world war Richard Avedon It was mobilized by the US Navy. Thanks to his photography knowledge, he was assigned to the studio in Sheeps Bay, Brooklyn where identity portraits were made for nautical files. He had been fond of photography ever since his father gave him a Rolleiflex with a portrait of the exiled Russian musician. Sergei Rachmaninov, the neighbor and friend of his grandfather who managed to publish. It was clear that after the war he would devote himself to photography. The portrait was one of the largest genres to which he devoted his activity. The other was fashion photography.. May 15 marks the centennial of his birth in 1923 in New York.
Son of a Russian Jewish immigrant family, he always has a white background in his portraits to reinforce the expressiveness and energy of the faces and the body language of the figures, Avedon also tried to capture the psychology of his models by playing with a triple gaze: the gaze of the characters, the photographer, and the viewer.. Avedon admitted the influences of Camus’ existentialism, Beckett’s dramaturgy and Antonioni’s cinema to construct the world of images. In the late sixties, he started a portrait style with large-format murals (up to 10 meters long) of well-known characters from North American culture such as Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg or The Chicago Seven. These murals were donated to the Metropolitan of New York in 2002. Rolling Stone magazine ordered The Family series, which featured portraits of characters from the social elite. Bertrand Russell, Beckett, Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, Brigitte Bardot, Francis Bacon, Borges, Charles Chaplin, Sofía Loren, who was in bed with Anne Bancroft during the filming of Dustin Hoffman’s “Graduate”… one of the most controversial known, It was the case that Dick Hickock, one of the murderers of Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood,” lived in the company of his father before he was executed. Capote wrote the texts of his photo book “Observations”. He also photographed Beatles for Look magazine and made album covers for Johnny Winter and Simon and Garfunkel.
After his extensive work in portraiture, he reflected on Performance and Los retratos del poder. After a trip to Paris, where he met French Haute Couture, he began to devote himself to fashion photography at the same time.. He gained fame in this field with one of his most iconic photographs, Dovima and the series of elephants. Vogue magazine later hired him for a million dollars a year, an unprecedented figure in the 1960s.
The fashion world enthusiastically welcomed Richard Avedon’s photographs full of freshness and naturalness.. He took the models out of the studio and placed them in exotic and sensual contexts, on the streets of big cities and in spectacular places such as circuses and airports, creating an unconventional staging that served as a reference for several generations of photographers. It also allowed the models to move naturally, away from corset poses. It made them new stars, and the names Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton, Lauren Hutton, Veruschka or Nastassja Kinski became as popular as movie actors and pop singers. In Richard Avedon’s 1988 Gianni Versace, he paid tribute to the most confident designer in his work. On November 6, 1995, The New Yorker published In Memory of the Late Mr. and Mrs. The company of a skeleton acting as a mannequin. The atmosphere of terror and death he gave to this series, supported by photographer Doon Arbus (Diane Arbus’s daughter), was intended to reaffirm his critique of consumer society. In 2009 the International Center Photography in New York organized the exhibition Avedon Fashion 1944-2000, which brought together a large part of his work in this genre.
A little-known aspect of Avedon is its social photography., 752 portraits taken in the West of the Americas, 17 Union States between 1979 and 1984, commissioned by the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth (Texas), as well as black and white portraits of the most disadvantaged miners. , the unemployed, the homeless, the farm workers, the waiters, the thieves, the inmates, the mentally ill, the amusement park workers… the inhabitants of the West that has ceased to be a land of promises. Their faces reflect the struggle for survival of Earth’s wretched. Each portrait is accompanied by the caregiver’s name, occupation, location, age and date. He returned to the genre in 1989 with a report on German reunification, in which he reflected a panorama of fear and confusion that contrasted with the joy shown by other photojournalists.
Avedon was a committed artist against the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War. (Mission Council photo is one of his best) was arrested several times after participating in demonstrations that he regularly photographed.
He died of a stroke in a hospital in San Antonio (Texas) at the age of 81 while working on the On Democracy series for The New Yorker in 2004.
According to an idea by author James Baldwin, “Nothing Personal” (1964), “Diario del siglo” (1970) and “Autobiography” (1993) are also included. His assistant, Gideon Lewin, recently released “Avedon behind the scenes (1964-1980)” featuring footage that captures the artist’s moments and working methods. His photographs have been exhibited in museums around the world. One of her collaborators, Norma Stevens, runs the Richard Avedon Foundation.