Richard Avedon
Richard Avedon was born in New York City in 1923. Avedon attended the De Witt Clinton High School in New York, where he worked on the school paper with James Baldwin. He attended Columbia University for a short time to study philosophy. In 1942 he worked as a photographer for the US Merchant Marines Photography branch, taking identification pictures of servicemen. In 1944, he enrolled in Alexey Brodovitch's Design Laboratory at the New School for Social Research, in New York.
In 1945, Alexey Brodovitch, the art director for the fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar, hired Avedon as fashion photographer to take pictures of celebrities and to cover the fashion scene. He soon became the chief photographer for Harper’s Bazaar where he worked from 1945 to 1965. During the 1950s, Avedon also contributed to Life, Look, and Graphis, and became staff editor for Theatre Arts in 1952. In 1965, he left Harper's to work under Diana Vreeland and Alexander Liberman at Vogue. The majority of Avedon’s work is in black and white, whether fashion or people or famous personalities. He is credited with creating the look of Harper’s Bazaar magazine and being “the” fashion photographer of the 1950s. Avedon used a wide-angle lens, exaggerated camera angles, and strobe lighting to capture the unusual, often disassociated, expressions on the faces of his subjects. He presented fashion photography as theatre. Models leaped and emoted, often out doors, generating an aesthetic of spontaneity and light sexual candour that became the look of the post-war era.
Avedon’s most famous photograph was Dovima with Elephants. Avedon was always interested in how portraiture captures the personality and soul of its subjects. His portraits were easily distinguished by their minimalist style, where the person is looking squarely in the camera, posed in front of a sheer white background. He is also distinguished by his large prints, sometimes measuring over three feet in height. His large-format portrait work of drifters, miners, cowboys and others from the western United States became a best-selling book and traveling exhibit entitled In the American West, and is regarded as an important hallmark in 20th Century portrait photography.
In 1966, Avedon left Harper’s Bazaar to work as a staff photographer for VogueMagazine. In addition to his continuing fashion work, Avedon began to branch out and photographed patients of mental hospitals, the Civil Rights Movement in 1963, protesters of the Vietnam War, and the fall of the Berlin War. During this period Avedon also created two famous sets of portraits of “The Beatles.” Among the many other rock bands photographed by Avedon, in 1973 he shot “Electric Light Orchestra.” Avedon became the first staff photographer for The New Yorker in 1992.
Avedon's career was celebrated in an exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, in 1962,; a survey of Avedon's fashion photography organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1978; and "Evidence" a major retrospective of his work exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, in 1994. Richard Avedon was also recognized with many awards, including an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Art in London in 1989, the International Center of Photography Master of Photography Award in 1993, the Prix Nadar in 1994 for his photobook "Evidence," and the Royal Photographic Society 150th Anniversary Medal in 2003. Also in 2003, he received a National Arts Award for Lifetime Achievement.
Richard Avedon died in San Antonio, Texas on October 1, 2004; at the time of his death, Avedon was working on a new project entitled On Democracy, for the New Yorker.
