Richard Avedon: The Eyes of Fashion
No one has influenced 1990s fashion photography more than Richard Avedon, who practically defined the languages and forms aspired to by all the major fashion players until recent developments in inclusivity. With such an extensive career, even organizing just the main information about this photographer's history and collaborations is no small feat.
Richard Avedon is one of the most celebrated fashion photographers in the world, as he showed pop culture like never before, actively participating in its creation.
The photographer was born in 1923 in a very stimulating environment: his father owned a luxury clothing store on Fifth Avenue in New York, and representatives from magazines like Harper’s Bazaar, Vanity Fair, and Vogue frequently visited the store to stay updated on the latest fashions.
The Great Depression forced the family to close the shop and move to a smaller apartment, but this did not stop Richard from cutting out and collecting shots by the great photographers of the 1930s from the magazines he had read in those years.
Among his favorites were Martin Munkácsi
Edward Steichen
and Anton Bruehl
Richard's father introduced him to the principles of photography. The young man left university in 1942 and joined the merchant marine, where he served for 2 years as a photographer.
After this experience, Avedon took part in photography lessons with Alexey Brodovitch, then art director of Harper’s Bazaar, to whom Richard requested at least 14 appointments, all canceled, before managing to secure a meeting to show his shots.
Accepted as a photographer for the Bazaar, Richard's contribution was the final touch that helped define the new visual tone of the magazine. The photographer formed a deep bond with his three new mentors: Brodovitch, from whom he learned discipline and values; director Carmel Snow, whose humanity he appreciated; and fashion editor Diana Vreeland, eccentric and irremediably creative. This trio allowed Avedon's photography to develop further and blossom.
His shots did not resemble those of many of his predecessors, where women were made to look like statues or angels. Here, the figures came to life, danced, jumped, and moved. During this period of collaboration with the Bazaar, Avedon took some of the most unforgettable photos in the magazine's history.
Traveling among the consequences of the bombings at the end of World War II, Avedon skillfully recreated the atmospheres of pre-war Paris, creating sets almost from nothing, showing the version of the city as he imagined it.
Designers like Christian Dior were influenced by his style.
Avedon began working with Audrey Hepburn, and the two maintained a collaborative relationship throughout their respective careers. The actress represented perfection for his search for beauty beyond limits.
Frictions with the magazine arose with the arrival of model China Machado in 1958. Although fashion editor Diana Vreeland gave the photographer full creative freedom in choosing the models, the editor of Bazaar, Robert MacLeod, opposed the use of his photographs, ultimately leading to Avedon's departure in favor of a contract with Vogue, where Vreeland had assumed the position of new director.
One of Richard's first assignments for Vogue was what is still considered the most expensive fashion shoot in history, costing over $1 million in 1966. The concept revolved around Tolkien-like scenarios, taking advantage of the recent possibility of reaching the East by air, a destination that had previously been inaccessible and was now ready to captivate the collective imagination.
Avedon's style and artistic sensibility proved capable of transforming even rough diamonds into true icons, as happened with the British model Twiggy, who, with the photographer, went from London to conquer the States, paving the way for the miniskirt and "tomboy" hairstyles.
But amid the fervor of tensions generated by the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement, Avedon's photography was not limited to fashion. In parallel, reportage and portrait photography also found space.
Avedon collaborated with writer and high school friend James Baldwin on the book "Nothing Personal," which collects images of American culture in the 1960s, featuring Martin Luther King and William Casby, then one of the last Americans born into slavery and still alive. The photos are thought-provoking and sometimes disturbing but undoubtedly reflect the America excluded from glossy fashion magazines.
In Avedon's portraits, the camera resembled more of a weapon than a mirror to reflect others' complacency. Even at the cost of creating conflict, the photographer used interactions with his subjects to consciously recreate those internal reactions he wanted them to show. In this series of shots, for example, Avedon was not interested in portraying the Duke and Duchess of Windsor with their masks of cordiality. To recreate the emotions he had seen in them while watching them gamble, he invented that their beloved pug reminded him that his dog had been run over that morning.
Despite the dissonance between how these subjects wanted to be portrayed and the final result, Avedon photographed the most important personalities of the time, from politicians to artists, including Ronald Reagan, George Bush Sr., Barbara Streisand, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, the Beatles, Prince, and Janis Joplin. Richard loved analyzing handwriting and, in a similar way, loved "reading" the faces of his subjects in search of contradictions and connections, in search of complexity. His stylistic dynamism allowed him to find many sympathies, especially among musicians.
Avedon eliminated the superfluous from his photography, the elements of distraction: no refined lights or set objects, avoiding topics he knew he couldn't express best. What remained were white backgrounds and people who stimulated his interest and research.
One of Richard Avedon's most famous shots is perhaps that of actress Nastassja Kinski embraced by a boa constrictor. Interviews from the time reveal how much dedication both artists, the photographer and the actress, put into its creation: Nastassja lay naked on the cold cement for at least two hours, without losing control and professionalism, allowing the snake to move on her until the moment to capture. The idea of the snake, proposed by the actress herself, was enthusiastically welcomed by Richard, who, despite his fame, never wanted to demand full control, instead giving his subjects ample freedom to express themselves significantly and exploiting the ability to capture the most surprising results in that unplanned moment.
This is an approach that, reflecting on my photographic experiences, I have used very often: sessions of one hour stretched to two or three not only because we managed to create images that we found beautiful but also because we were having fun. The energy created when the photographer and model are in sync has often made a difference in the results for me.
For his commercial work, Richard Avedon used his distinctive style to play with the boundaries between art and commerciality, developing that visual vocabulary that continued to be used by various brands even in subsequent decades. Among the first brands to open this new phase of collaborations was Revlon, for which Avedon created shots designed to completely wrap the two pages of the magazine. The models included beautiful women of different generations. Richard worked with an entire artistic entourage, hairdressers, art directors, account executives, and clients with whom he created works of incredible discipline, obviously designed to sell a product. The dream of glamour and fashion. With these photos, Avedon helped sculpt and define the notion of beauty that remained in society's collective imagination until recent times. Among his most impactful works were those for Calvin Klein, which decreed the success of the brand.
But there is another name that was strongly characterized by Avedon's work in the 1980s: that of Gianni Versace, considered at the time an emerging designer. Working together, the two created a photographic mythology that influenced the world. This style recipe perfectly suited the era of the supermodels of the 1990s. Avedon and Versace shared energy and passion for everything that radiated beauty, creating an environment on the shooting sets where the models worked with great enthusiasm.
Among these services, one, in particular, further illustrates Richard Avedon's approach. The energy that the photographer poured into these shots involved the two women, who threw themselves into the moment, letting themselves go to that chemistry that turned into iconography. Fabrics and bodies seemed sculpted in marble, the two women seemed like twisted Greek statues. Even the hair seemed sculpted, and in some shots, it gave the impression of waving like divine flames. Avedon did not direct but followed the two models in their discovery of poses and experiments with movement. The rigid execution disappeared. The images were permeated with drama and narrative, echoing the baroque atmospheres that were part of Gianni Versace's brand identity.
Another distinctive feature of Avedon's shots for Versace was the different use of the male figure in the composition of the images. Avoiding the stoic masculinity sold by the identities of other brands, the photographer subverted the use of male figures, turning them into Adonises enchanted by the strength of their women and submissive to their beauty. The models embodied the ideal of male beauty, but the energy they exuded was decidedly feminine.
While creating these very glamorous shoots for Versace, Avedon found space for another project, that of showing the humble realities in which many Americans lived at the time; he thus created a new photographic series entitled "The American West", which he realized over seven years. In the case of these portraits, Avedon chose those subjects who could express the ideas that he himself wanted to express, discarding the others. Richard felt he had to try to embark on this project outside his comfort zone to try to complete his portrait of America. He dealt with industrial complexes, farms, and vagabonds, people who were not used to the camera but were excited about the idea of being photographed and expressed a depth that was very different from his usual work for Avedon. Richard chose to portray these people not in their best conditions, with their Sunday clothes, but in work clothes, with faces dirty with earth or in the same conditions in which they would find themselves wandering the streets. He let himself be guided by improvisation, often without knowing how or who he would photograph that day. One of the few exceptions was the shot of the man with the bees, an idea he said came to him in a dream.
In the world of art and curators, this photographic series was not very appreciated. The criticisms mainly concerned the photographer's intentions, which, according to some, had little to do with the American West. Some of the subjects complained about the shots chosen for the final project, but for Avedon, this type of photography is only realized by lending oneself to the artist and the art, whatever the final result and the opinion of those who were immortalized.
After some years without fashion editorial productions, Avedon returned with "In Memory of the Late Mr. and Mrs. Comfort." The photographer's works had long been characterized by a clear gender division, fashion photography on one side, and more serious works of portraiture and reportage on the other. But for Richard, there was never a clear division between fashion and life. Everyone dresses, everyone wants beautiful clothes. The photographer would have liked to unite his vision of society in a story that followed the modalities of a fashion editorial, but no magazine was interested in this project. Proposing the idea to "The New Yorker" of this almost post-apocalyptic concept, where the subjects had in a certain sense forgotten the meaning of things, the director offered him a space of 12 pages. Avedon created 26 pages, all of which were published. It was a very different project from his previous ones due to the content: here, fashion was part of a world that thought and reasoned, that tried to remember; the shots represented every person and not just models; death, a subject always absent in fashion magazines, was in a certain sense exorcised here.
Richard Avedon was working on a new project in 2004, called "Democracy," focused on the presidential election race in the United States, but he was struck by a cerebral hemorrhage and, at the age of 81, left the world with a portfolio of over 50 years that is impossible to ignore.
At the age of 55, a heart condition had put him in serious danger of life, and facing his mortality, he began to use photography as a way to confront the things that terrified him. Perhaps this is why, in the meantime, he had never stopped shooting.
Some shots that I found interesting did not find space in this narrative, but I still wanted to collect them here at the end.
