Richard Avedon Sold Glamour for a Living and Refused It to Everyone Else

Richard Avedon

Photo: blaze6t9 / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 15, 1923 New York City
Died	October 1, 2004 (81)
Occupation	Fashion Photographer
Awards	Hasselblad Award · CFDA Lifetime Achievement Award · AIGA Medal

Richard Avedon ran two studios inside one career. In the first, he made fashion move: models laughing, running and leaping across the frame, an entire industry learning from him that a dress looked best on a woman who seemed to be going somewhere. In the second, he took the movement away. He stood his sitters against a sheet of white paper, gave them nothing to hold or lean on, and waited until whatever face they had prepared for the camera wore off.

That second studio is the one that still starts arguments. The American photographer spent much of his reputation on portraits that the people in them did not always enjoy, from senators and generals to miners and truck drivers in the West. His admirers see a refusal to lie. Plenty of critics have seen cruelty with a large-format camera, and Avedon never settled the question.

He was born in New York City on May 15, 1923, the son of Jacob Israel Avedon, a Russian-born immigrant who ran a dress business on Fifth Avenue. He joined the camera club of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association at twelve, and at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx he worked on the literary magazine The Magpie alongside James Baldwin, a friendship that would come back decades later as a book. He enlisted in the Merchant Marine in 1942 and spent the war as a staff photographer.

The break came in 1944, when Alexey Brodovitch, the Russian-born art director of Harper’s Bazaar, took him on. Two years later Avedon opened his own studio. His fashion pictures threw out the stiff mannequin poses of the period, and the best known of them, Dovima with Elephants, made at the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris in 1955, places a model in an evening gown between circus elephants with a calm that still looks slightly impossible.

Hollywood paid attention. In Funny Face, Stanley Donen’s 1957 musical, Fred Astaire plays a fashion photographer modelled on Avedon, who served on the film as visual consultant; his overexposed close-up of Audrey Hepburn, little more than eyes and mouth floating on white, appears in it. It fixed an image of him as the charming technician of glamour.

He wanted to be taken for more than that. Observations, in 1959, set his portraits beside text by Truman Capote. Nothing Personal, in 1964, reunited him with Baldwin in a book about the country, the year after Avedon had gone out to photograph the civil rights movement. The white background was already doing its work: no setting, no props, nowhere to hide.

From the mid-sixties he worked for Vogue under Diana Vreeland, and from 1973 he shot most of its covers until Anna Wintour took over the magazine in 1988. The commercial work paid for the other kind. Between 1969 and 1971 he made four large group murals: the Chicago Seven, the antiwar defendants tried after the 1968 Democratic convention; the family of Allen Ginsberg; Andy Warhol with members of the Factory; and the Mission Council, the American officials who ran the war in Vietnam, photographed in Saigon.

The most private of his series pointed the same camera at his own family. Over six years he photographed his father, Jacob Israel Avedon, as the old man declined, up to the week of his death in September 1973. The Museum of Modern Art showed the portraits in 1974, and the exhibition caused real controversy. Two years later Avedon filled an entire issue of Rolling Stone, dated October 21, 1976, with The Family: sixty-nine portraits of the people who ran the United States, from Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan to Cesar Chavez.

Then came the West. In 1979 the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth commissioned him to photograph the region, and for more than five years, across twenty-one states, he hung his white backdrop in the shade and photographed miners, farmers, factory workers, drifters and the unemployed. He photographed 762 people on roughly 17,000 sheets of film. In the American West opened at the museum in 1985, with 110 of them, and appeared as a book the same year.

This is where the canonized Avedon gets complicated. The New York Times read the show as a vision of the West “as purgatory, if not hell, on earth”, and Art in America saw a “blighted culture that spews out casualties by the bucket”. The harder charge was that a Manhattan fashion photographer had gone west looking for hardship and hung it on museum walls for audiences who would never meet these people. Avedon called the work a tribute and pointed out that the book was titled In the American West, not The American West. He also wrote the sentence his defenders still quote: all photographs are accurate, and none of them is the truth. It is a good line. It is also a convenient one for the man who picked the moment, the light and the crop. Ron Howard‘s new documentary recalls that an earlier New York Times review had accused him of photographing poor people for an affluent audience, and that it took him a year to get back to work.

The criticism did not slow the institutions. The Metropolitan Museum of Art gave him retrospectives in 1978 and 2002, the Whitney another in 1994, and in 1992 Tina Brown made him the first staff photographer of The New Yorker. He won the Hasselblad Award in 1991 and the Prix Nadar in 1994. He married twice, to Dorcas Nowell, later the model Doe Avedon, from 1944 to 1949, and to Evelyn Franklin in 1951; they had a son, John. He was still working when he died in San Antonio, Texas, on October 1, 2004, of complications from a cerebral hemorrhage, while on assignment for The New Yorker.

The argument he started is being held in public again. Howard’s Avedon, made with access to the archive of the Richard Avedon Foundation premiered at Cannes in May 2026, and Netflix, which bought global rights, says it will stream the film later this year. In Toronto, the Image Centre’s show of his portraits of aging runs until December 5 and restages the 1974 pictures of his father. On October 9, the Palazzo Esposizioni in Rome opened all 110 photographs of In the American West, curated by Clément Chéroux, the first time Italy has seen the complete series, with his working Polaroids and letters to sitters alongside, until January 31, 2027.

The miners and truck drivers on those walls in Rome stand on the same white paper they stood on four decades ago, still giving nothing away. Visitors can now judge for themselves the question the reviewers raised in 1985: whether Avedon was looking at these people, or using them to look at himself.

Tags: art, artists, Ron Howard, James Baldwin, American photography, Dovima with Elephants

Related People

Related People

Discussion