F-arty Friday: Yvonne Turns the Lens on Richard Avedon

One of my favorite photographers is Richard Avedon, who revolutionized fashion photography after the Second World War. Handsome enough to be a model himself, Avedon’s groundbreaking work for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue set a new standard in the trade. It’s often said that his photos defined the American image of beauty, style and culture.

Here’s what Avedon himself said about the subject:

I was overwhelmed. (Fashion Editor) Mrs. Vreeland kept calling me Aberdeen and asking me if a wedding dress didn’t make me want to cry. They’re all serious, hardworking people—they just speak a different language.

So I took my own models out to the beach. I photographed them barefoot, without gloves, running along the beach on stilts, playing leapfrog. When the pictures came in, Brodovitch laid them out on the table and the fashion editor said, ‘These can’t be published. These girls are barefoot.’ Brodovitch printed them. After that, I was launched very quickly. Those candid snapshots were in direct contrast to what was being done. I came in at a time when there weren’t any young photographers working in a free way. Everyone was tired, the war was over, Dior let the skirts down, and suddenly everything was fun. It was historically a marvelous moment for a fashion photographer to begin. I think if I were starting today, it would be much harder.

Avedon’s true passion was portrait photography. A few years ago, I was lucky enough to see an exhibit of some of his portraits at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It was one of the most powerful and emotionally stirring exhibits I’ve ever seen.

Of his portraits, Avedon says:

My photographs don’t go below the surface. They don’t go below anything. They’re readings of the surface. I have great faith in surfaces. A good one is full of clues. But whenever I become absorbed in the beauty of a face, in the excellence of a single feature, I feel I’ve lost what’s really there…been seduced by someone else’s standard of beauty or by the sitter’s own idea of the best in him. That’s not usually the best. So each sitting becomes a contest.

One famous face Avedon shot several times belongs to Brooke Shields. On working with the photographer, Shields told Interview magazine, “When Dick walks into the room, a lot of people are intimidated. But when he works, he's so acutely creative, so sensitive. And he doesn't like it if anyone else is around or speaking. There is a mutual vulnerability, and a moment of fusion when he clicks the shutter. You either get it or you don't.”



Brooke obviously got it, because here’s what Avedon had to say about his subjects:

When the sitting is over, I feel kind of embarrassed about what we’ve shared. It’s so intense. Snapshots that have been taken of me working show something I was not aware of at all, that over and over again I’m holding my own body or my own hands exactly like the person I’m photographing. I never knew I did that, and obviously what I’m doing is trying to feel, actually physically feel, the way he or she feels at the moment I’m photographing them in order to deepen the sense of connection.

Avedon’s photographs tour art galleries and museums all over the world. If you’re lucky, there may even be some of his photographs in the permanent collection of a gallery near you.

And if a day goes by without my doing something related to photography, it's as though I've neglected something essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten to wake up. I know that the accident of my being a photographer has made my life possible.

*All Avedon quotes and photographs from http://www.richardavedon.com.