Richard Avedon

The first faces Richard Avedon photographed seriously were not portraits but records. He was born in New York in 1923 to a Jewish family whose money came from his father Jacob's Fifth Avenue dress business, and grew up among garments, mirrors and a remote father who preached strength and money. At DeWitt Clinton High School he worked on the literary magazine with a classmate named James Baldwin, then failed too many courses to graduate. In 1942 he enlisted in the Merchant Marine and was made a staff photographer, shooting identification pictures of crewmen with the Rolleiflex his father gave him. Heads, straight on, no props. After his discharge, Alexey Brodovitch of Harper's Bazaar looked at the portfolio, hired him, and put him in his own class at the New School.

Fashion photography in 1945 meant a woman standing very still. Avedon set her moving — laughing, running, mid-air, out on the street, and in 1955 posed between two circus elephants at the Cirque d'Hiver in a Dior gown. He was Harper's Bazaar's chief photographer for two decades, followed Diana Vreeland to Vogue in the mid-1960s, and shot most of its covers until 1988. The other half of the work ran the opposite way: an 8-by-10 view camera, blank white paper, flat light, nothing to hide behind. Plenty of the people who sat for it hated the result.

In 1979 the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth commissioned him to photograph the American West. Over five years he and his crew shot 762 people and exposed roughly 17,000 sheets of film in rodeos, carnivals, coal mines, oil fields, slaughterhouses and prisons. On drifters, miners and waitresses he used the identical apparatus he had used on Eisenhower and Marilyn Monroe: white paper, hard light, prints bigger than life. The verdicts never converged. Admirers hold it the most serious American portraiture since the Depression, and Avedon himself called it his best work. Detractors call it a rich New Yorker turning poor people into grotesques for gallery walls, pity manufactured in a studio and sold as truth. It was the charge already laid against Diane Arbus, whose prints Avedon collected.

He collapsed in San Antonio on assignment for The New Yorker, whose first staff photographer he had been since 1992, and died there on October 1, 2004, of complications from a cerebral hemorrhage. He was 81, and had been at work on a project about the coming election. The Richard Avedon Foundation holds the negatives. Since then the reputation has drifted to the art side of a line he spent his life straddling. A Dovima print brought 719,000 pounds at Christie's in 2010, the Met hung his murals in 2023, Gagosian marked the centenary with three exhibitions, and Philip Gefter's 2020 biography argued for him as one of the century's consequential artists. The West argument is still running.

Richard Avedon's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Dovima with Elephants artwork
  Cirque d'Hiver, Paris, in a Dior gown. A print sold for 719,000 pounds in 2010. 1955
• Observations book
  Portraits by Avedon, commentary by Truman Capote 1959
• Nothing Personal book
  Made with James Baldwin, his high school magazine colleague 1964
• Jacob Israel Avedon artwork
  Portraits of his dying father, made from 1969 until 1973 and hung at the Museum of Modern Art 1974
• In the American West book
  762 sitters over five years, and the argument about it has not closed 1985
• Evidence 1944-1994 book
  Fifty years of the work, and a Prix Nadar 1994

• May 15, 1923 aged 0 Born in New York City to a family in the dress trade His father Jacob Israel Avedon, a Russian-born immigrant, ran a retail dress business on Fifth Avenue.
• 1942 aged ~19 Enlists in the Merchant Marine and is made a staff photographer He shot identification portraits of crewmen with the Rolleiflex his father had given him.
• October 1944 aged 21 First photographs run in Harper's Bazaar Alexey Brodovitch hired him off his portfolio and enrolled him in his own class at the New School.
• 1955 aged ~32 Photographs Dovima with elephants at the Cirque d'Hiver in Paris
• 1964 aged ~41 Publishes Nothing Personal with James Baldwin Civil rights workers, cultural figures and patients in a mental asylum, against Baldwin's text.
• 1965 aged ~42 Leaves Harper's Bazaar for Vogue Wikipedia dates the move to 1965, other accounts to 1966.
• May 1, 1974 aged 50 MoMA opens a show of nothing but the portraits of his dying father Eight pictures, chosen from sittings made between 1969 and 1973.
• September 1985 aged 62 In the American West opens at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth Five years of work, 762 sitters, and an immediate split among critics.
• October 1, 2004 aged 81 Dies in San Antonio while on assignment for The New Yorker Complications from a cerebral hemorrhage. He was 81.

• Diane Arbus 1923–1971
  Photographer whose square-format portraits remade American documentary photography collected and was compared to
• James Baldwin 1924–1987
  Essayist and novelist whose searing explorations of race, sexuality, and identity remain profoundly relevant. collaborated with
• Truman Capote 1924–1984
  Writer of Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood — an early nonfiction novel. collaborated with
• Marilyn Monroe 1926–1962
  Actress and cultural icon whose blend of vulnerability and glamour made her a symbol of Hollywood's golden age. photographed
• Andy Warhol 1928–1987
  Pop art pioneer whose Campbell's soup cans and celebrity portraits defined contemporary American art. photographed
• Dorothea Lange 1895–1965
  Documentary photographer whose Depression-era images defined the visual record of the 1930s. measured against