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	Reply to this message    Back to Forum Index       Joe.H   Posted on Sun, 03.10.04 09:26:35, Email: Subject: What about Richard Avedon ? he just died and I thought people would be so sad but Oh surprise ! , nobody said nothing , :( , I have visited several forums , Fashist! , Iconography , and just a few of people cared about him. RICHARD AVEDON , I will miss you ! Alina   Posted on Sun, 03.10.04 17:17:31, Email: Subject: RE: What about Richard Avedon ? ... he was one of my favorite fashion photographer ever, such a big artist, I will miss his work. Vincent   Posted on Sun, 03.10.04 17:30:00, Email: Subject: Portraitist Richard Avedon dies October 3, 2004 Richard Avedon, who died on Friday aged 81, was probably the most influential fashion photographer of the postwar era and arguably the greatest American portraitist of any epoch. In a career that began before the end of the Second World War, Avedon created an extraordinary portfolio that documented the gamut of American public life, from "Ike" Eisenhower to Andy Warhol, and from Marilyn Monroe to Nastassja Kinski. His trademark was to present his "sitters" - a misnomer since he always photographed subjects standing up - full frontal, against a pure white background. Though never a crude or gratuitous iconoclast, he did not make it his business to flatter the famous: a 1957 portrait of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor which, in the words of China Machado (a former model and later editor of Harper's Bazaar), "made her look like a toad", outraged royalists. And when his second book Nothing Personal appeared in 1964, he was berated by critics for representing celebrities as freaks and monsters. Time's reviewer wrote that Avedon's lens was "a subtler, crueller instrument of distortion than any caricaturist's pen". His response was that he was simply telling the truth about a person. In retrospect, the controversy belonged to an age when deference was still expected from portrait artists. The photographs that shocked then now seem strikingly humane and compassionate. Few people, if any, refused an invitation to be photographed by him. Avedon's reputation as an artist was first founded on his record as a fashion photographer. From the mid-1940s he spent nearly 20 years at Harper's Bazaar, followed by another 24 at American Vogue, interspersed with work for advertising accounts. One of his legacies to the fashion industry was that he "created" models, several generations of them, from Dovima in the 1950s, and Jean Shrimpton and Veruschka in the 1960s, to Stephanie Seymour in the 1990s. In what he called his "deeper work" he travelled through the American South in the early 1960s photographing civil rights demonstrators, former slaves, white racists and, most memorably, patients in a Louisiana mental asylum. These pictures subsequently appeared in Nothing Personal. In 1971, he went to Vietnam for a second time, producing a harrowing series of portraits of napalm burns victims. Avedon suffered a brain hemorrhage last month while on assignment in San Antonio, Texas, for The New Yorker. - Telegraph Richard Avedon in 1979. Photo: AP Vincent   Posted on Sun, 03.10.04 17:34:17, Email: Subject: World-famous photographer Richard Avedon, 81, dies Nation/World By Madison J. Gray Associated Press October 2, 2004 NEW YORK -- Richard Avedon, the revolutionary photographer who redefined fashion photography as an art form while achieving critical acclaim through his stark black-and-white portraits of the powerful and celebrated, died Friday. He was 81. Avedon suffered a brain hemorrhage last month while on assignment in San Antonio for The New Yorker, taking pictures for a piece called "On Democracy." He spent months on the project, photographing politicians, delegates and citizens from around the country. He died at Methodist Hospital in San Antonio, said Perri Dorset, a spokeswoman for the magazine. "We've lost one of the great visual imaginations of the last half-century," said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker. Avedon's influence on photography was immense, and his sensuous fashion work helped create the era of supermodels such as Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford. But Avedon went in another direction with his portrait work, shooting unsparing and often unflattering shots of subjects from Marilyn Monroe to Michael Moore. "The results can be pitiless," Time magazine critic Richard Lacayo once noted. "With every wrinkle and sag set out in high relief, even the mightiest plutocrat seems just one more dwindling mortal." As a Publishers Weekly review once noted, Avedon helped create the cachet of celebrity -- if he took someone's picture, they must be famous. His fun-loving, fantasy-inspiring approach helped turn the fashion industry into a multibillion-dollar business. Scores of imitators struggled to replicate his signature style, known simply as "The Avedon Look." "The world's most famous photographer," trumpeted a 2002 story on Avedon in The New York Times. It was a title he wore for decades; back in 1958, he was named one of the world's 10 finest photographers by Popular Photography magazine. Prestigious institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington staged major Avedon retrospectives, and his list of honors stretched across more than 50 years. In 2003, he received a National Arts Award for lifetime achievement. During his career, Avedon worked for such photograph-driven publications as Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, and served as The New Yorker's first staff photographer. His skill also earned him another title: He was reputed to be the world's highest-paid photographer. Avedon was married in 1944 to Dorcas Nowell, a model known professionally as Doe Avedon. They divorced after five years. In 1951, he married Evelyn Franklin. The pair later separated. He also developed relationships with some of the world's most sought-after models, including Dorian Leigh; Dorothy Horan, best known as Dovima; Sunny Harnett; and Leigh's younger sister, Suzy Parker. "He's the most wonderful man in the business because he realizes that models are not just coat hangers," Parker once said. An Avedon shot of Parker from 1959 was credited with igniting the bikini boom. joe.h   Posted on Sun, 03.10.04 20:08:35, Email: Subject: RE: What about Richard Avedon ? ALINA , nice to read you ! =) By the way , do you know if Richard Avedon photographed Madonna ? I have been looking for any picture through Internet and I find nothing. Alina   Posted on Mon, 04.10.04 01:01:21, Email: Subject: RE: What about Richard Avedon ? There are a lot of big photographers who have done pictures of Madonna, but I think, that she has never worked with Richard Avedon. Anyhow, there are no known pictures of her which would confirm this. Christopher   Posted on Mon, 04.10.04 02:57:48, Email: Subject: RE: What about Richard Avedon ? Rest in peace... he is the 4rd; Ritts, Newton, Scavullo, Avedon. Herb Ritts Helmut Newton Francesco Scavullo Richard Avedon ------------------------------------------------- We will never forget you! Sit   Posted on Mon, 04.10.04 05:25:46, Email: Subject: News.Telegraph - Richard Avedon 02/10/2004 Another interesting article about R. Avedon from news.telegraph: Richard Avedon, who died yesterday aged 81, was probably the most influential fashion photographer of the post-war era and arguably the greatest American portraitist of any epoch. In a career that began before the end of the Second World War, Avedon created an extraordinary portfolio which documented the gamut of American public life, from Ike Eisenhower to Andy Warhol and from Marilyn Monroe to Nastassja Kinski. His trademark was to present his "sitters" - a misnomer since he always photographed subjects standing up - in full frontal view, against a pure white background. There is no distraction or context in his pictures, other than the contours, features and expression of the face itself. Since he portrayed his subjects almost invariably without props or adornment, Avedon relied on generating a moment of tension or theatricality in order to capture the likeness he was looking for. Though never a crude or gratuitous iconoclast, he did not make it his business to flatter the famous: a 1957 portrait of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor which, in the words of China Machado (a former model and later editor of Harper's Bazaar), "made her look like a toad", outraged royalists. And when his second book Nothing Personal appeared in 1964, he was berated by critics for representing celebrities as freaks and monsters. Time's reviewer wrote that Avedon's lens was "a subtler, crueller instrument of distortion than any caricaturist's pen". Avedon's response was that he was simply telling the truth about a person: if, for instance, he made Dorothy Parker look like an alcoholic, it was because she was an alcoholic. In retrospect, the controversy belonged to an age when deference was still expected from portrait artists. The photographs which shocked then, now seem strikingly humane and compassionate, more concerned with the loneliness and pathos of celebrity than with its monstrosity or pretension. In any event, such was the power of Avedon's camera to confer a certain kind of immortality that few, if any, ever refused an invitation to be photographed by him. His reputation as an artist was first founded on his record as a fashion photographer. From the mid-1940s he spent nearly 20 years at Harper's Bazaar, followed by another 24 at American Vogue, interspersed with work for such advertising accounts as Revlon, Du Pont and Helena Rubinstein. The orthodoxy in photography laid down by Henri Cartier-Bresson, whom the young Avedon greatly admired, had been that images could not be cropped, manipulated or altered in the darkroom. Fashion photography, in particular, was dominated by an aesthetic of chill, almost lifeless formality - the models little more than humanly perfect mannequins. Avedon broke all the rules. With restless energy he would use distortion and blurring of images and complex retouching techniques to get the effects he wanted; he also took models out of studios and on to location, and replaced bloodless poise with action and movement. One of Avedon's legacies to the fashion industry was that he "created" models: he enabled several generations of them - from Dovima in the 1950s, and Jean Shrimpton and Veruschka in the 1960s, to Stephanie Seymour in the 1990s - to express personality and presence in his images. It was this scenario that was celebrated in the charming 1956 film Funny Face, starring Audrey Hepburn as a naive, but feisty, bluestocking who is "discovered" working in a Manhattan bookshop by the photographer **** Avery, played by Fred Astaire. The character of Avery, of course, was based on Avedon, though Astaire was twice the real photographer's age. Avedon acted as a visual consultant to the film. "I had to teach Fred Astaire to be me," he recalled. "After wanting to be him all my life." Funny Face gently satirises the fashion world, thanks in part to a splendid performance by Kay Thompson ("Think pink!"), loosely modelled on Harper's Bazaar's fashion editor, Diana Vreeland, but it is also a measure of the stature Avedon had achieved by the mid-1950s. While Avedon soon established himself as an acknowledged master of fashion photography, he always felt keenly Cartier-Bresson's injunctions on the social responsibility of the photographer. Throughout his career he used the very substantial fees he earned from commercial work to subsidise classical documentary projects - what he called his "deeper work". In the early 1960s he travelled through the American South photographing civil rights demonstrators, former slaves, white racists and - most memorably - patients in a Louisiana mental asylum. These pictures subsequently appeared in Nothing Personal. In 1971 Avedon went to Vietnam for a second time, three years before the end of the war. He was not a natural war photographer, but using his signature technique of staging people in front of a plain background, he produced a harrowing series of portraits of napalm burns victims. In 1972 Avedon took part in an anti-war demonstration at the Capitol Building, Washington DC; he was arrested and jailed for civil disobedience. In 1976 Avedon was commissioned by Rolling Stone magazine to present a portfolio on America's "power elite". His approach was even-handed; White House staff, Wall Street businessmen, labour leaders and cultural bigwigs alike took their place in front of his Deardorff camera, but even so, the pictures created a storm. They were the "photographic equivalent of roadkill", thought one critic. Another, the writer Janet Malcolm, objected to a 1975 exhibition that "low sensationalism was being offered as high seriousness". Similar accusations of cynicism returned to haunt Avedon when In the American West, photographs of labourers, ranch hands, miners and drifters from the mid-West, appeared in 1985. Constantly facing the charge of voyeurism which dogs any successful photographer, Avedon was often forced to maintain a fiction of agnosticism. "The camera has a point of view," he maintained. "All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth." In reality, he believed passionately that portraits were pointless unless they had a story to tell, at least a truth to communicate. "Faces," he once said, "are the ledgers of our experience". While Avedon's portraits often clashed with a naive American optimism and preoccupation with celebrity, his genius was to make his subjects - whether Henry Kissinger or a hobo from New Mexico - perform themselves, to show something essential about themselves. For Avedon, who always worked not behind, but to one side of, the camera, the relationship between photographer and photographed was of exchange and dialogue. "If each photograph steals a bit of the soul," he asked, "isn't it possible that I give up pieces of mine every time I take a picture?" Richard Avedon was born on May 15 1923 in New York, the son of Jacob Israel Avedon and Anna Polonsky. His father was a Russian-Jewish immigrant who had been brought up in a New York orphanage and had gone on to found a successful women's clothing business which later became Avedon's of Fifth Avenue. Jacob Avedon insisted on the value of self-reliance and on one occasion allowed young **** (then about 12) to drink a bottle of wine, inflicting a terrific hangover but also a lesson on the dangers of alcohol. Self-reliance, in fact, proved of more immediate value to Jacob Israel, for his business failed in the Depression and he was forced to carry on in much-reduced circumstances. Young Dick's interest in magazines started early: "My parents put the New Yorker in my crib. I saw Vogue and Vanity Fair around the house before I could read." He took one of his first photographs aged nine when he was taken to a concert given by Rachmaninoff and waited by the stage door afterwards with a box camera. By coincidence, Rachmaninoff lived in the same apartment building as the Avedons, and Richard Avedon later recalled listening to the Russian musician practising hour after hour - "Maybe that's where I learned about discipline and what's beautiful about rigour, what's compelling about craft." Young Dick's school career was mixed. At that time he wanted to be a poet and, aged 17, he won first prize in an inter-high school poetry contest. He also edited the school magazine at DeWitt Clinton High, on which the black American writer James Baldwin was literary editor. (Baldwin later collaborated with Avedon, contributing an apocalyptic text to Avedon's "civil rights book", Nothing Personal.) But Avedon never graduated from high school and left home in 1941 to take a job as an errand boy for a small New York photographic company, still harbouring ambitions to be a poet. In 1942, though, he was called up for military service and entered the Merchant Marine. His father bought him his first proper camera, a Rolleiflex, as a leaving present. With this encouragement, Avedon applied to the photography branch of the Merchant Marine and spent most of his service at Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn taking thousands upon thousands of photographs of servicemen for their ID cards. It was a dully repetitive task, but the format of a full-face portrait in front of a bare background left its mark on him. When his war service ended in 1944, Avedon decided to try his hand as a professional photographer. He persuaded the managers at Bonwit Teller, a fashionable department store, to lend him clothes for a free fashion shoot. He then used all his savings to hire Bijou Barrington, then New York's most expensive model, for the shoot. Bonwit Teller liked the results and hired him. To build up his portfolio, Avedon also experimented using his sister as a model. Two years younger than he, Louise Avedon was a precocious beauty, but as a young adult she started to suffer from severe mental illness; she died aged 42 in a mental institution. Avedon was haunted by her death, and by her beauty. In an interview published in 1985 in the magazine Egoiste, he said: "Louise's beauty was the event of our family and the destruction of her life. She was very, very beautiful. She was treated as if there was no one inside her perfect skin, as if she was simply her long throat, her deep brown eyes . . . All my first models - Dorian Leigh, Elise Daniels, Carmen, Marella Agnelli, Audrey Hepburn - were brunettes and had fine noses, long throats, oval faces. They were all memories of my sister." By 1946 Avedon was installed as a staff photographer at Harper's Bazaar under the direction of Diana Vreeland and the magazine's art director, Alexey Brodovitch. Brodovitch saw the potential of Avedon's private work, but rejected his first shoots for Harper's on the grounds that they were too derivative and predictable. Avedon took the hint and drove off to a beach with his own models and photographed them playing leapfrog and walking about the sand on stilts. Other fashion editors were scandalised by the idea of models appearing in Harper's barefoot - and without gloves - but Brodovitch was delighted. FROM then on Avedon was given an unparalleled degree of creative freedom. While his studio shoots eschewed anything but the bare white background, his fashion photography used diverse locations, from zoos and circuses to the launching pads at Cape Kennedy. On one occasion, in a 1951 shoot with the model Dovima, even the pyramids of Egypt became props in an Avedon fashion feature. One of Avedon's favourite models of the 1950s, Suzy Parker, once remarked: "He's the most wonderful man in the business, because he realises that models are not just coat-hangers." Indeed, he displayed an unusual empathy for what he regarded as "a group of under-developed, frightened, insecure women" who have to be made to "feel beautiful". The models in turn became his muses, and he once confessed that: "I have to be a little bit in love with my models." He was, though, always both a gentleman and a consummate professional. "You can't f*** and photograph at the same time," he observed. "Taking fashion pictures of models is not a matter of arousal. It's hard work." Avedon was prolific during his time at Harper's, and the collaboration with Brodovitch bore fruit when he agreed to design Avedon's first book, Observations (1959), a masterpiece of typography and layout which included text by Truman Capote. His first exhibition opened at the Smithsonian Institution in 1962, and his work is still displayed there as part of the permanent collection. Even the design of the Smithsonian show was innovatory: the portraits were mounted in a haphazard collage style, in prints of widely varying sizes. This was followed in 1970 by a major retrospective at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, thought to be the largest show ever devoted to the work of a single photographer. One of its highlights was a series of photographs of Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman and the other defendants in the "Chicago Seven" conspiracy trial of the previous year. The exhibit provoked a spontaneous anti-war demonstration on the opening night of the show. It was not until 1974 that Avedon first exhibited in New York. The collection shown at the Museum of Modern Art comprised only pictures of his father, who had died the year before after a long illness. The series, which has been published widely since, forms a profoundly moving tribute. Since the mid-1970s Avedon's work (both his fashion photography and his portraiture) has been exhibited throughout the United States and has toured the world. He also published a further five books: Portraits (1976), Avedon (1978), In the American West (1985), An Autobiography (1993) and Evidence, 1944-1994 (1994). Even Avedon's greatest peers, William Klein and Irving Penn, cannot rival such consistently superlative work. He received numerous honours and prizes in his long career: as far back as 1958 he was cited as one of the world's 10 best photographers by Popular Photography. In 1980 he received the National Magazine award for Visual Excellence, and in 1985 he was named the American Society of Magazine Photographers' Photographer of the Year. In 1992 he had the distinction of becoming the first staff photographer in the history of the New Yorker magazine, under the editorship of Tina Brown. He was the subject of a major retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in late 2002. Avedon was a small, wiry man, with a distinctive, centre-parted shock of hair which gradually turned from black to white as he grew older. He was somewhat near-sighted and worn horn-rimmed glasses all his life, although characteristically these would be pushed up to rest on his forehead whenever he was examining prints. He spoke in a gravelly voice with an East Coast accent. He had an impish energy and boundless curiosity. Over the years he employed and trained many young and aspiring photographers at his office-cum-studio-cum-home on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, and as he got older he seemed only to thrive the more in the company of younger people. Avedon was a demanding tutor, impatient with anything less than perfection from those around him, but he was also an immensely courteous, charming and kind man. He was without pretension and would behave in the same direct, engaging manner toward all his sitters. But his instincts were always those of a New York Jewish liberal, and if he took against someone he could be waspish. On assignment for Harper's Bazaar in 1948 he took a photograph of Coco Chanel, who was known to have been a Nazi sympathiser. His editors refused to run the picture when they noticed that on the wall behind Chanel was a poster which asked "POURQUOI HITLER n'a pas eu sa bombe?" Much later in his career he explained that he had placed portraits of Henry Kissinger and the gay beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg on facing pages of An Autobiography (1993), because he had once attended a dinner and heard Kissinger make derogatory remarks about "faggots". Blessed with longevity and enormous zest (his mother Anna was still sculpting in her nineties), Avedon continued working all his life. "I can see myself as a very old man in a terrific wheelchair," he once told an interviewer. "Only, I won't be photographing the tree outside my window, the way Steichen did. I'll be photographing other old people." But he suffered a brain haemorrhage last month while on assignment in San Antonio, Texas, for the New Yorker, taking pictures for a piece called "On Democracy". Avedon married first, in 1944, the model Dorcas Nowell, who went on to work as Doe Avedon; the marriage was dissolved in 1949. He married secondly, in 1951, Evelyn Franklin; they had a son before separating. Sam   Posted on Tue, 05.10.04 22:56:43, Email: Subject: RE: What about Richard Avedon ? I started a topic about him on my forums as soon as I learnt about his stroke. Got a few replies in the French section but none in the english one... Check my forum Y.S.   Posted on Tue, 12.10.04 01:51:53, Email: Subject: RE: What about Richard Avedon ? I think we will all miss you! Page: 1/2 Next Page