As a boy in Manhattan, Richard Avedon posed for family photographs beside dogs his parents had borrowed from other people, because a dog made the household look the way a household was supposed to look. He spent the next half century doing the opposite to everyone who sat in front of him. Avedon, Ron Howard‘s documentary for Netflix, is built on that reversal, and on a line the photographer repeated about his own work: that photographing other people was “almost like I’m writing my own autobiography.”

The film is a feature-length documentary about the American fashion and portrait photographer, and it is made almost entirely out of his own material. The Richard Avedon Foundation opened its archive to Howard: unseen stills, recordings made behind the camera, and the interviews Avedon gave over his lifetime, which the film uses as a first-person narration. Imagine Documentaries and Fifth Season produced it with the foundation. Around that recorded voice sit new interviews with his son John Avedon, Isabella Rossellini, Lauren Hutton, Tina Brown, the writer Adam Gopnik and the art dealer Larry Gagosian.

That is the premise, and it is a more interesting one than the usual parade of famous sitters. Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Andy Warhol and Buster Keaton all passed through Avedon’s studio before his death in 2004, at 81, and all of them are in the film’s orbit. If Avedon meant what he said, though, they are not the subject. They are pages in a book about him, and the documentary’s real material is the man deciding how each page should read.

Howard has been specific about where that shows. Asked to choose four photographs to explain the film, he picked Chaplin in 1952, shot during the McCarthy years when the comedian had become a target of politicians and the right-wing press, and Avedon “only had one crack at this.” He picked Monroe in 1957, the portrait in which the public smile has gone out of her face, and described it carefully: “This is not a moment caught. It’s a moment that he observed.” He picked a high-school basketball player named Lew Alcindor, photographed outside the studio, years before he became Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. And he picked Avedon’s father.

That last choice is where the autobiography line stops being a figure of speech. Avedon photographed his father in Sarasota, Florida, over the years before the older man died of cancer in 1973. In archive audio the photographer says that “photographing my father wasn’t just photographing my father,” but “photographing who we really were.” He called getting to know him at the end “one of the happiest things in my life.” The household that once borrowed a dog for the picture got, at last, a picture with nothing borrowed in it.

The film’s method, as described by critics who saw it at Cannes, follows the photographer’s own priorities. TheWrap’s Steve Pond wrote that the first half hour is organised around Avedon’s approach, themes and obsessions rather than around a life told in order, and only afterwards settles into a more conventional biography. In that opening stretch Avedon describes himself in the plainest terms: “I follow no rules.” He talks about the seamless white backdrop he made his signature, “the existential white,” where “the only thing you see is the architecture of the face.”

That white wall deserves the attention the film reportedly gives it, because it was never neutral. By Avedon’s own account it left nothing in the picture but the face, and he used it for Vietnam-era generals, for the working people of the American West and for Ronald and Nancy Reagan alike. As the film tells it, Nancy Reagan was unhappy that her hands had not been retouched. The butchers, coal miners and waitresses of his western portraits stood against the same blank backdrop as presidents and film stars, and the powerful did not always enjoy the comparison.

Set the film beside its ancestors and its shape becomes clearer. Hollywood got to Avedon first. Funny Face, Stanley Donen’s 1957 musical, gave Fred Astaire a fashion photographer modelled on him, a charming man who turns a bookshop clerk played by Audrey Hepburn into a magazine face; the documentary includes a scene from it. The non-fiction portraits of image-makers that followed have mostly been made from inside the family or the fan club. Annie Leibovitz: Life Through a Lens was directed by her sister, Barbara Leibovitz. Bill Cunningham New York and Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel were affectionate studies of people who decided what fashion looked like. Helmut Newton: The Bad and the Beautiful let his models answer back. Avedon arrives with the most privileged access of all of them, an estate’s own drawers, and that access is both its strength and the thing to watch.

Ron Howard is not the obvious director for a photographer whose portraits could be cruel. His documentaries have leaned toward warmth: The Beatles: Eight Days a Week, Pavarotti, Jim Henson Idea Man. He told Flaunt that “The Richard Avedon Foundation was willing to open up its archives for a film,” and described “drawer after drawer of just these remarkable images,” including a portrait of John Ford he had not known existed. He also said he “related to his drive and ambition to be productive,” and that he considers Avedon “braver and more courageous than I could ever claim to be.” Howard has called the project “an object lesson in a creative life,” a phrase that sounds like a director looking at a career that resembles his own.

The later half, according to the reviews out of Cannes, moves to the private record: a troubled sister, Louise, a conflicted relationship with his father, two marriages. John Avedon describes a father who was intensely driven and often away from home, and whose “moral and political convictions were very real.” Of his father after a civil-rights project, he says: “I had never seen him like that.” Larry Gagosian supplies a lighter memory of brunch at Avedon’s home, hard-boiled eggs and champagne: “I thought it was super elegant.” Tina Brown is there as the editor who made Avedon the first staff photographer in the history of The New Yorker.

Pond also noted what the film leaves to one side: the long-standing rumours about Avedon’s bisexuality, which the documentary sidesteps. That is the limit of a portrait made in partnership with the subject’s foundation, and it is the same limit Avedon imposed on everyone else. He chose the light, the wall and the moment the smile dropped. Here, through his archive and his recorded voice, he is still choosing much of what we see of him.

The closing line Pond quoted puts the case plainly: “What makes him a good photographer is not his technique, it’s the mind behind the camera.” Howard’s film has the photographs and the voice. Whether a documentary assembled from the photographer’s own drawers can show the part of that mind he kept out of frame is the question Avedon brings to Netflix, and the one it cannot settle on its own terms.

Avedon runs 104 minutes. It had its world premiere as a Special Screening at the 79th Cannes Film Festival in May 2026 and screened at the Telluride Film Festival in September. Netflix acquired worldwide rights in July, its fourth acquisition from that year’s Cannes, and releases the documentary globally on 11 November 2026, with an awards campaign behind it.

Tags: Netflix, documentary, Ron Howard, Richard Avedon, Isabella Rossellini, Avedon

Avedon — Ron Howard’s Netflix Documentary Reads Marilyn and Chaplin as the Photographer’s Autobiography

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