Edited by Rebecca A. Senf Over sixty years of work by one of the great masters of twentieth-century photography
Photographer Richard Avedon, with a more than six-decade-long career, produced innovative and delightful work in fashion, as well as incisive and captivating portraits. Over the course of his lifetime he worked with a number of models and a wide range of portrait subjects, creating a powerful body of pictures that allow his viewers to study the likenesses of actors, ballet dancers, celebrities, civil rights activists, heads of state, inventors, musicians, visual artists and writers.
Avedon offers viewers the opportunity to study faces without crossing any socially imposed boundaries about staring too long; he encourages viewers to think about the people before them, the lives they have lived, their private personalities and public personas, their struggles, accomplishments, disappointments, and joys. Richard Avedon. Relationships presents a selection of 100 iconic fashion photographs and portraits, from the extensive collection at the Center for Creative Photography, to delve into his approach to photographing people.
Avedon’s combination of talent and skill, technical proficiency and attuning to his individual subjects, allowed him to make portraits that are riveting presentations of the people he photographed. Indeed, he achieved mastery of the portraiture form. Avedon had the opportunity to photograph a number of his portrait subjects on more than one occasion. Within the catalogue it is possible to see painter Jasper Johns in 1965 and 1976; novelist Carson McCullers in 1956 and 1958; the Beatles Andy Warhol, Marilyn Monroe, and poet Allen Ginsberg in 1963 and 1970. Perhaps the most dramatic and powerful example of Avedon’s ongoing photographic relationship is that with his friend and collaborator, Truman Capote.
About the Author:
Rebecca Senf is an American writer, and curator working in the field of photography. She is the Chief Curator at the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, since January of 2016.
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A tribute to Richard Avedon (1923-2004), the American photographer whose name and images became associated with iconic magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and The New Yorker.
A celebrated portraitist, Avedon was among the founding fathers of fashion photography, revolutionizing its style when, as early as 1945, he stopped portraying models in static poses, favoring instead realistic settings. Avedon’s images are almost cinematographic, leading the viewer to imagine the tales and stories they seem to evoke.
Avedon’s lens not only immortalized the era’s most famous models, but also a rich array of personalities including actors, dancers, celebrities, artists, musicians, writers, civil rights activists, and even heads of state. Not infrequently, the same subject was also portrayed several times and at different periods, establishing true photographic relationships that reveal different aspects of both the person portrayed and their relationship with the photographer.
Realized in collaboration with the Center for Creative Photography and The Richard Avedon Foundation (with Versace as main partner and Vogue Italia as media partner), Richard Avedon. Relationships features more than one hundred iconic fashion photographs and portraits from the Center’s collection including artists Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Louise Nevelson, Ezra Pound, Truman Capote, John Ford, Michelangelo Antonioni, Humphrey Bogart, Marilyn Monroe, Jimmy Carter, George Bush, Malcom X, Kofi Annan, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and last but not least, models Dovima, Veruschka, and Linda Evangelista. In all of these extraordinary works, one perceives the photographer’s ability to capture facial expressions, body language and the moments, changes, styles and tensions that have characterized our society through the years. These qualities are even more evident in the black & white portraits for which Avedon became famous. Photos of people who made history in the 20th century, of fashion models and ordinary people, which
