[pure-silver] Avedon
- From: "Bill Earle" <wearle@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: pure-silver@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 8 Oct 2004 09:41:44 -0400 (EDT)
Thought some readers might be interested.
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RICHARD AVEDON
Oct 7th 2004
Richard Avedon, portrait photographer, died on October 1st, aged 81
IN AMERICA'S bicentennial year, 1976, Richard Avedon was commissioned
to photograph the great and good of the country for ROLLING STONE.
Among the meetings with edgy ex-presidents, leonine great writers and
radicals with Afros out to their shoulders, one incident stuck in his
mind. He went to photograph Henry Kissinger, the unsparing maker of war
on Vietnam and Cambodia; and Mr Kissinger said, "Be kind to me."
Unwittingly, he touched a nerve. Whatever else Mr Avedon thought about
photography, an art about which he was unceasingly articulate and
philosophical, he did not want it to be kind. His whole life was lived
in opposition to the idea that photographic portraits should be posed,
stiff and formal, and that photographers should revere or beautify
their subjects. A studio portrait of his father used to sit on the
piano when he was growing up; the family called it "Smilin' Jack
Avedon", and it seemed to be of a man he had never known. That was
kindness, and it was not true. His parents, New York City retailers
without much money, took their own family photos in front of other
people's better houses, with borrowed dogs. That was self-enhancement,
and the camera connived in the lie.
By contrast, Mr Avedon's work lived on the dangerous side. His first
piece of fashion photography, a six-page spread for HARPER'S BAZAAR in
1946, took models away from their studio poses--every hair in place,
lipstick perfect, each fold of the skirt deliberate--and put them on
the beach, running and jumping, with no gloves and no shoes. Such
spontaneity was so shocking that fashion shoots of the old style never
recovered from it. Mr Avedon was taken on not only by HARPER'S, but by
VOGUE and LOOK and, late in life, the previously photo-hating NEW
YORKER, which let him do whatever he liked. He went on shocking. In
1955, he had photographed the model Dovima in a triumph of elephants.
In 1995, for the NEW YORKER, he shot models canoodling with skeletons.
His first love, however, was taking portraits. There the trademark
austerity of his pictures, in black and white against a white backdrop
with straight, clinical lighting, suggested that no image could be
closer to the reality. He photographed Eisenhower with the look of a
surprised baby, Gerald Ford with a smile he was nervously adjusting,
Marilyn Monroe in a sad dream, Judi Dench with her make-up half-smeared
on her face. Yet, as he said again and again, this was not the truth.
It was a surface, "and a surface is all you have to work with". He
could take off no more layers unless the subject allowed him to. What
he was recording was a performance for the camera.
This was true even when his subjects were not famous. Mr Avedon had no
interest merely in the high life. He also photographed patients in the
East Louisiana State Hospital, napalm victims in Vietnam and, over two
years, his own father as he died from cancer. In 1963 he wandered
through the South, taking pictures of racists and civil-rights workers;
in 1980 he went west, photographing miners, drifters, bar-girls and
shipping clerks. His white sheet would be draped on a wall or the side
of a van, his camera set up (he had switched in 1969 from a Rolleiflex
to an 8 x 10 view camera, preferring the way he could stand beside it
rather than behind it, encouraging the subject), and he would take
strangers' pictures. Their eyes were wary. Again, the masks had come
down.
THE SELF THROUGH THE LENS
To his mind, Mr Avedon was born a portrait photographer. His sister was
beautiful; as a child he took her picture again and again with a
Brownie Box camera, and once developed a negative of her directly on to
his skin. Fashion photographs from magazines decorated his bedroom
walls. His war service, in the merchant marine, consisted of taking
around 100,000 ID photographs of sailors: for the first time, that
white background and that full-frontal stare. He once said that he
could not spend a day without doing photography, and that it was only
by taking pictures that he felt he was alive.
It was also, he admitted, a way of discovering who he was. Making a
portrait was not a one-way street, with the photographer digging and
intruding his lens into the mind of the sitter. Each new subject--a
congressman standing by the flag, a dancer gesturing, a beekeeper with
his charges crawling on his naked skin--also brought out in Mr Avedon
facets of his own character. The portraits, once done, represented less
the sitter than his own opinions; the "human predicament" he wished to
show was, in fact, his own. His autobiography, published in 1993, was
composed of 300 portraits of other people.
In 1976, he was not particularly kind to Mr Kissinger. Nor did he feel
he was successful. He said later that he would have liked "anger,
ineptitude, strength, vanity [and] isolation" to show through in the
portrait. Instead, Mr Kissinger stands rather stiffly to attention,
defensive and distrustful. "What, or who, is this photograph?" Mr
Avedon asked. "Is it just a shadow representation of a man? Or is it
closer to a DOPPELGaNGER, a likeness with its own life, an inexact twin
whose afterlife may overcome and replace the original?" He knew the
answer.
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Regards,
Bill Earle
www.wfephotography.com
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