AVEDON, THE PHOTOGRAPHER THAT TRENSCENDS THE GENRE.
“His fashion and portrait photographs helped define America’s image of style, beauty, and culture for the last half-century.” THE NEW YORK TIMES. Richard Avedon was fifty-five years old in october of 1978 and at the top of his game. He had spent his life photographing people of power,people of accomplishment and women of great beauty : presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Ford, and Carter, Samuel Beckett, Bob Dylan, Marella Agnelli. The mission council in Saignon, the Chicago Seven. Four major exhibitions in eight years had now culminated in retrospective of his fashion work at the Metropolitan Museum Of Art. “ An Avedon portrait” had become a standard phrase in the art world’s vernacular. His most unflinching work had placed him in the pantheon of the 20th century’s greatest photographers. Avedon has the instincs of a great court painter, his style is essentially a court style, his way with the camera worldly, fluent, knowing. His particular court, rather than being a fixed place, is more like an idée fixe shared by many people. Call it smart and powerful New York, there is no king,but stylishness itself reigns. Like most dreams of assembling the most glamorous figures in the realm to glory in the light of shared importance.
In the publication - more an album than a catalogue - that acompagnies Richard Avedon’s retrospective exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art,there is a snapshot of the photographer,taken in 1978 on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Above him is a banner, with his signature in red against a blue field, and, in white, “Photographs 1947 - 1977”. In a list of exhibitions at the end of this album, that triumphant show is identified as a “fashion retrospective” tacitly implying that other of Avedon’s exhibitions were not quite so narrowly concieved. It was indeed as fashion photography that it was recieved at the time. That was the great excitement of the show. The Avedon show reprsented a different impulse, and aroused a different order of excitement. That impulse was to demonstrate that certain forms of commercial or applied art, were aesthetically meaningful even if their purposes were those of visual rhetoric. - to provoke certain attitudes and arouse certain desires- The excitement was that Avedon was at the Met. The name alone carried the glamour of certain labels ( Chanel, Guerlain, Givenchy, Balenciaga, Schiaparelli, Dior...) and it was almost certainly to be in the presence of that palpable glamour that a great many visited the museum who might otherwise never have set foot there. The images were large and hung the way works of art characteristically are hung in modern museums, simply framed, handsomely illuminated. The best was Dovima and the elephants,cirque d’hiver,Paris which Avedon did in 1955, and which will be always remembered in histories of photography, of fashion, of illustration, of art. It is a great image and even if its original occasion was to represent again from some designer’s line of that year in a fashion magazine, it transcends the occasion without obliterating the point of high fashion illustration, or indeed of high fashion itself. Dovima with the elephants has the power of a dream, and might, all by itself, support the thesis that dreams are a form of wish fulfillement. It is a dream of power and magic and of promise, in that superb garnement, with its marvelous cascade of satinsilk. The woman who wears it draws onto herself a strength greater than that of the hugest animals, now docile to her touch or even to the nearness of her touch. If elephants are no match for the well-dressed woman,how can mere men hope not to yield, to obey, to adore. The fashion designer designs dreams and that is the entire point of the subtile craft. What Avedon achieved was the objective expression of such dreams in a single image, so dense with possibilities, erotic, aesthetic and psychological that it stands as a portrait of an inextinguishable wish and metaphor of empowerment. That it may, in 1955 also have aroused the desire for a particular garnment by showing what it must feel like to wear it, subtracts nothing from its artisty or communicative energy. The image defines the genre of popular art to which the kind of
photography practiced by Avedon belonged. It is the art of making wishes objective and myths explicit, its peers are certain movies, or ballads or even styles of costume, all of them universalized through mass distribution. They service ( as poetry evidently no longer can ) longing hearts shortchanged by what Kant once called “ the niggardliness of a stepmotherly reality “. It is no small thing to have achieved an image as unforgettable and potent as Dovima with the elephants, but it is also true that most viewers of the 1978 exhibition would be hard pressed to place a second Avedon image alongside it. After the symbolic martyrization of the beekeeper, the images tend to blur into generic Avedons of either of two kinds : models shown leaping in a way that is now kind of cliché but which could only rarely have been a convincing idealization of what it would mean to wear the garnment modeled,and heads, commonly of famous men though sometimes of women wether leaping models or intensely studied faces, the subject is shown almost always against an undifferentiated white ground, as characteristic of the Avedon photograph as the undiffrentiated black ground is of Carravagio. Photographs that fit into neither of these kinds belong to Avedon’s periodic efforts to break free of the stylisation and preoccupations that have made him famous as fashion photographer and as portraitist, he’s hostage to his own powerful but limited repertory. It is difficult to believe that Avedon himself is all that free of the “little myth” given his breakaway efforts into what one supposes he regards as “real” art photographing drifters, the insane, the war-maimed, and bringing to these commercially unrewarded tasks the skills and gifts that have made him the greatest fashion photographer he is, and the portrayer of the famous and successful. And perhaps, because Avedon is a political activist in his life, it might strike him at times that there is a tension between photography as he is famous for practicing it and photography as it ought to be practiced -bearing witness to injustice and pover ty,agression,cruelty,awakening the conscience of viewers to squalor,horror and the waste of human lives. As though he has to compensate, or atone. And - who knows - that explains the cruelty with which he portrays the famous and successful, the naked contempt with which he depicts aristocrats at a venetian ball, the manupulative will with which he drove his models into leaps and flutters,or gets celebrities of the lower magnitude to look silly, like the monty pythons naked except for the hats, clutching their genitals, or poor candy darling looking vulnerable and confused with a garter belt framing his sad penis. This at least would be a way of bringing the two sides of Avedon’s art into something like a moral unity. The commercial art would be a kind of aside to the viewer, a way of dissociating himself from the world he is paid to celebrate, beckoning us to join him on his platform of anger or didain. Given the distance between the world in which he attained his great success and the world whose conspicious problems are so clearly of concern to him, there is a lived tension in his work that is an almost tragic dimension, particularly in view of the disproportion between the undeniable artistic merit of his best commercial work and the largely undistinguished quality of what he doubtless regards as his real art. Avedon is a presence in every image he makes.
“ The subject must become familiar with the fact that, during the sitting, he cannot shift his weight, can hardly move at all without going out of focus or changing his position in the space. He has to learn to relate to me and the lens as if we were one and the same. And to accept the degree of discipline and concentration involved. As the sitting goes on, he begins to understand what I am responding to in him and finds his own way of dealing with that knowledge. The process has a rhythm that punctuated by the click of the shutter, and my assistants changing the plates of film after each exposure. There are times when I speak and times when I do not, times when I react to strongly and destroy the tension that is the photograph. I stand next to the camera, not behind it, several inches to the left of the lens and about four feet from the subject. As I work I must imagine the pictures I am taking because since i do not look through the lens, I never see precisely what the film records until the print is made. I am close enough to touch the subject and there is nothing between us except what happens as we observe one another during the making of the portrait. This exchange involves manipulatios, submissions. Assumptions are reached and acted upon that could be seldom be made with impunity in ordinary life “ RICHARD AVEDON “ His pictures showed young ladies enjoying life to the full as they preened and jumped with joy in their Paris confections, Avedon’s photographs did not perhaps have technical perfection and they were all better for this, for they created the statement that he wished to make-of movement caught forever by his lens.” CECIL BEATON.
AUDREY HEPBURN BY AVEDON
By focusing on fashion photography, having Richard Avedon’s stills as articulation, the film Funny Face places Audrey Hepburn at the center of fashion’s new philosophies. The importance of Funny Face to Hepburn’s involvement with fashion comes from director Stanley Donen’s conscious referencing of Avedon.The images are, however, carefully prepared and composed, as their use in Donen’s film makes clear the photographs are intergrated into the film as freeze-frames that punctuate sequences depicting fashion shoots involving Hepburn.
Audrey Hepburn in the film-musical Funny Face, photographed by Richard Avedon in 1956.
Audrey Hepburn by Richard Avedon, 1967.
“ I am and forever will be devastated by the gift of Audrey Hepburn before my camera... I cannot lift her to greater heights, she is already there. I can only record, i cannot interpret, there is no going further than who she is...she has achieved in herself her ultimate portrait. I was working on a freezing evening in the tuileries, I saw Audrey coming toward me, she was out with her dog. The way she moved through the low winter light stopped me dead, forced me to cross the path to avoid the flat out immobilising power of her presence, there was no way that i could enter the perfect moment .” RICHARD AVEDON
Audrey Hepburn’s portraits by Richard Avedon, taken in 1956 while filming the musical Funny Face.
Dovima with elephants, Paris cirque d’hiver 1955 by Richard Avedon. Dovima and Avedon created arguably the most famous fashion photograph of all time, “Dovima with Elephants”, in Paris in 1955. The photo shows Dovima in haute couture with circus elephants surrounding her. There are prints in The Metropolitan Museum, and The Museum of Modern Art. Of her relationship with Avedon, Dovima was quoted as saying, “We became like mental Siamese twins, with me knowing what he wanted before he explained it. He asked me to do extraordinary things, but I always knew I was going to be part of a great picture.” Dorian Leigh, fashions model turned agent, said, “He used Dovima like a painter uses a medium. She was his medium.” Model Carmen Dell’Orefice a friend of Dovima said, “They had the greatest fantasy affair on paper that the public ever witnessed. Avedon had the skill to metamorphose a fledgling model. He could finish the pieces of her persona.” In Dovima with elephants, Avedon presented his own version of beauty and beast “ by posing Dovima before a group of elephants. the variety of textures created by this combination revolve around contrast : The model, smooth, ivory skin versus the wrinkled gray hides of the elephants, her fluid and graceful arm movements versus the awkward confinement of their chained legs, the elegence and civilization versus their clumlinence and animal nature. Avedon often illustrated the contrast between youth and aging in his photographs and the variety through contrast in Dovima may suggest the transistory nature of beauty and inevitably of physical change with the onset of old age.
MARILYN MONROE BY AVEDON Marilyn, my wife by Arthur Miller Life magazine December 22,1958
When I heard Marilyn was going to make a series of still pictures in the costumes of past movie stars, i wondered what she and photographer Avedon hoped to demonstrate beyond the fact that she could be made up to look like other women. I went up to Avedon’s studio one afternoon to have a look. I found a girl sitting before a mirror in a wig and beaded dress, marking an absurdely arched bow on her lips. This much i expected. It was when she looked at me and smiled that a certain expectation began to enter the situation for she had an intensity in her eyes, a concentration that charged the air around her with its importance. With the make-up artist standing by to offer advice, she returned to study the photograph of Clara Bow propped up under the mirror. In the studio Avedon was dressing his set as ecstatically and nervously as a director about to bring a show into New York. His assistants had the same air about them, the air of people involved in a hit. Marilyn came onto the set then, and a record player was started, songs of the 20s burst forth. Marilyn aimed an experimental kick at a balloon on the floor. she said she was ready. Avedon yelled “Go!” and she pursed her mouth around her cigarette, kicked a balloon, shot the fan out forward and she had made a world. I suddenly saw her dancing on a table, a hundred Scott Fitzgeralds sitting all around her cheering, Pierce Arrow cars waiting outside, a real orchestra on the stand, the marines in Nicaragua. We all found ourselves laughing. Her miraculous sense of sheer play had been unloosed. Suddenly she was all angles, suddenly the wig had become her own hair and the costume her own dress. Her ebullience, her sauciness was not of our time, and yet we were not laughing because she was making fun of something old-fashioned. I think it was the laughter of recognition of innocence and cunning, the sweet wit that used to accompany a girl’s rebellion 30 years ago, a rebellion which, unlike that of our day seemed to have had no horrifying and psychiatric implications and was only a lot of fun. Before my eyes, she has ressurected not a woman so much as a spirit, the spirit of an age, in the same way it seems to me she has ressurected the spirit of other ages : Lillian Russel’s full blown daintiness and dignity in thights, the essence of a rather elegant sentimentalism, Theda Bara’s pouncing aggressiveness, concocted by men. A merry Marilyn, slinky and seductive and enchanting as any of the great figures resumes her own high-styled personality, the one that has attracted her enormous public.
Marilyn dressed as Clara Bow by Richard Avedon.
Marilyn Monroe as Theda Bara in cleopatra by Richard Avedon,1958.
Marilyn Monroe dressed as Lillian Russel photographed by Avedon in 1958.
Marilyn Monroe dressed as Marlene Dietrich in The blue angel photographed by Avedon, 1958.
AVEDON FOR GIANNI VERSACE
Kristen McMenamy and Nadja Auermann for Versace spring 1995 campaign photographed by Richard Avedon
Kate Moss for Gianni Versace couture fall/winter 1996/1997 catalog by Richard Avedon. It’s a trip back to his late 60s psychedelia. Richard Avedon and Gianni Versace were one of fashion’s most devoted couples photographically speaking, for 20 years Avedon translated the designer’s sexy vision into a draft of ads that have since become icons.
IN MEMORY OF THE LATE MR & MRS COMFORT One of the forgotten great photo shoots with renowed Richard Avedon-“ In memory of Mr & Mrs Comfort, this is a fable filled with supermodel Nadja Auermann about a woman and her deceased husband. In some ways, it may be a good phantasmagoria of the current global crisis.“ This photo shoot that featured clothing from various high fashion designers was first published in the New Yorker in 1995.
We can read many meanings into these brilliant images, but more than anything they represent a farewell of sorts between Avedon and the fashion journalism that made him a top-tier celebrity. The series of 27 pages of designer-clothes photos are shocking and disruptive visually, existing as an undeniable social commentary on the world of couture and luxury living, Bonfire of the Vanities-style.The Richard Avedon Mr. and Mrs. Comfort photos for The New Yorker represent a revulsion against the very high society world that embraced him. They are a violent cariacature of a world of thin women and rich men who are — at the end of the day — dust like the rest of us mortals.A sensuality-drenched the skelton of Mr Comfort appears thwarted by Mrs Comfort, who has abandoned sex for stilletos, even if red is a primary color in the fashion selections. The many sexual references and poses to the Garden of Eden are physically marked ‘Stricly No Entry’. Unable to enjoy pleasures of the senses, Mr and Mrs Comfort resort to the pleasure of materialism, as a substitute for carnality and intimacy. The splendor of their surroundings is reminiscent of the splendor of Rome and the Vatican, where excess is defined only as it relates to flesh but not pomp and circumstance.
Coco Chanel and Suzy Parker.
Richard Avedon and Sophia Lauren.
Sunny Harnett, turban and evening dress by Dior, ThÊâtre Marigny, Paris 1954.
Antonella Agnelli, New York january 1961.
Stephanie Seymour, dress and shoes by Chanel, Paris 1994. In both fashion and his portrait photographs, Avedon has taken the style of spontaneous witness into realms of artiďŹ ce, glamour, and celebrity and others followed. To be sure, these photographs have been staged, and yet they depict women who themselves are active and engaged with the world and far from the white-gloved, static beauties of earlier fashion photography.
BIBLIOGRAPHY : All articles and graphics are arranged by Asmaa Aman.
The madonna of the future: essays in a pluralistic art world by ARTHUR COLEMAN DANTO. New York Magazine April 4,1994 issue Court Gestures by MARK STEVENS. Avedon at work in the american west by LAURA WILSON. Washington Post, Camera works by FRANK VAN RIPER. Foundations of art and design by LOIS FICHNER-RATHUS. lIFE magazine December 22, 1958 Marilyn,my wife by ARTHUR MILLER. Change in the 20th century american photography by GRETCHEN GARNER. All Images are copyrighted and strictly for educational and viewing purposes only.
Charlize Theron and Patty Jenkins,, actress and director of Monster, 2004.