Genuine and hypnotic photos by Richard Avedon
Richard Avedon’s dramatically authentic images in Immortal: Portraits of Aging
Richard Avedon, Photographer, Richard Avedon (1923-2004), New York, 31 May 2002, Courtesy of Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona. Richard Avedon Archive, gift of the artist © The Richard Avedon Foundation
Iconic portraitist: Richard Avedon
American portraitist and fashion photographer Richard Avedon is featured in Immortal: Portraits of Aging, 1951-2004 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
Gloria Swanson, Actor, Richard Avedon (1923-2004) New York, 4 September 1980 © The Richard Avedon Foundation
Richard Avedon (1923-2004) was born, lived and worked in New York City. His interest in photography began at an early age. During World War Two, Avedon enlisted in the armed forces and served as a photographer in the U.S. Merchant Marine.
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At the age of twenty-two, Avedon began working as a freelance photographer, primarily for Harper’s Bazaar. He quickly became the legendary magazine’s leading fashion and editorial portrait photographer.
William Casby, Born into Slavery, Richard Avedon (1923-2004),Algiers, Louisiana, 24 March 1963 © The Richard Avedon Foundation
In 1965, Avedon joined Vogue, where he created iconic fashion covers and advertisements that defined a generation for twenty years.
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His brand-defining work and long associations with Calvin Klein, Revlon, Versace, and dozens of other companies resulted in some of the best-known advertising campaigns in American history.
Louise Nevelson, Sculptor, Richard Avedon (1923-2004), New York, 13 May 1975 © The Richard Avedon Foundation
From the beginning of his career, Avedon made formal portraits for publication in magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar, Theatre Arts, Life, and Look. He became the first staff photographer at The New Yorker in 1992, where his portraiture helped redefine the magazine’s aesthetic.
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Throughout his career, Avedon ran a successful commercial studio and is widely credited with erasing the line between art and commercial photography.
Gabriel García Márquez, Writer, Richard Avedon (1923-2004) Mexico City, March 29, 2004 © The Richard Avedon Foundation
His success with fashion editorials and advertisement campaigns gave Avedon the freedom to pursue major personal projects in which he explored his cultural, political, and personal passions.
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Avedon was fascinated by portraiture and by photography’s capacity to suggest his subjects’ personalities and evoke their lives.
Avedon sought to represent advancing age in the faces of people
He said, “My photographs don’t go below the surface. I have great faith in surfaces. A good one is full of clues.”
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For nearly half a century, Avedon sought to represent advancing age in the faces of people he photographed: from artists and writers to politicians and performers, to the everyday citizens in his best-known series: In the American West.
Toni Morrison, Writer, Richard Avedon (1923-2004) New York, September 10, 2003, gelatin silver print © The Richard Avedon Foundation
Immortal: Portraits of Aging focuses on Avedon’s fascination with the process of aging. These portraits – visual sermons on bravado, as he sometimes called them – dramatised the universal experience of aging and testified unflinchingly to the determination with which people confront the relentless advance of mortality.
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In contrast to his fashion photography, with its standard practice of representing personalities in the most flattering way through favourable angles, soft diffused light, and post-photography retouching, Immortal. Portraits of Aging presents the subject in the most realistic, authentic and dramatically unfiltered way.
Marcel Duchamp, Artist, Richard Avedon (1923-2004), New York, 31 January 1958 Courtesy of Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona. Richard Avedon Archive, gift of the artist© The Richard Avedon Foundation
Avedon’s portraits of aging highlight infirmities, wrinkles, crow’s feet, folds of skin, and liver spots – the outward markers of what he once called “the avalanche of age,” falling over the human face and body.
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Avedon explored aging throughout his career and photographed ordinary citizens, celebrities, and public figures with a consistently faithful adherence to strong lighting, natural poses, and attitudes, as well as hairstyles, clothing, and accessories, as vital and revelatory elements of his images.
Subjects are set against a stark black or white background
His straightforward style of framing the subject, set against a stark black or white background, is evident in his lifelong documentation of aging, from his earliest work to his later exploration of this theme.
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Always intense and equally revealing are his portraits of Marcel Duchamp (1958), a pioneering conceptual artist; William Casby (1963), a man born into slavery; writer Samuel Beckett (1979); sculptor Louise Nevelson (1975); silver screen star Gloria Swanson (1980); American novelist Toni Morrison (2003); and Colombian writer and journalist Gabriel García Márquez (2004).
Samuel Beckett, Writer, Richard Avedon (1923-2004) Paris, 13 April 1979 © The Richard Avedon Foundation
This body of work was a recurring subject for Avedon. Some have said that the images are cruel and hostile to the subject. Yet he did not shy away from the controversies; instead, he presented what he believed were images that brought to the surface the deep, unspoken essence and character of the subject.
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Throughout his life, Avedon held numerous exhibitions and published many books on all facets of his work as a photographer. He continued working until after suffering a cerebral haemorrhage while on assignment for The New Yorker; he died in San Antonio, Texas, on 1 October 2004.
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The Richard Avedon Foundation was established during his lifetime and presents the thousands of photographs he took over the course of his sixty-year career.
Text Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and Cammy Yiu and photos Richard Avedon
