Word: avedon
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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NOTHING PERSONAL by Richard Avedon and James Baldwin. Atheneum...
...over a decade, Photographer Richard Avedon's elegant, epicene high-fashion pictures have set the slick tone for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. Now it turns out that all along Avedon has been disgusted by the affluent America he celebrates. To register his revulsion, he got together with James Baldwin (who was his old classmate in The Bronx's prestigious De Witt Clinton High School) to plan a work that would "expose the corruption in American life. I am fascinated by decadent faces." Baldwin's brief text is oddly irrelevant, obviously hasty, too often drawn...
...Avedon is possessed of a lens that is a subtler, cruder instrument of distortion than any caricaturist's pencil. Washington Hostess Perle Mesta appears whiskered and wattle-throated; Dwight Eisenhower looks like his own corpse simple people getting married at City Hall look bloated, ugly, foolish; Adlai Stevenson looks tired, disillusioned, a little sly; Playwright Arthur Miller looks scrufty, torn by anxiety...
...When Avedon lets up on the extreme of technique, he can catch a masterpiece of self-satire such as a group photo of eleven plump, prim, grim general of the Daughters of the American Revolution. His unaffected snap of a drooping, slightly disheveled Marilyn Monroe may be the most psychologically inward picture ever taken of her. But the slippery bias of the book is best shown by the inclusion of one picture: a so-so photo of Major Claude Eatherly, slyly captioned to perpetuate the oft-disproved legend that this disturbed man was the pilot who dropped the firs atomic...
There was still much ado about the nothing worn (above the waist, anyhow) by frail Model Christina Paolozzi, 22, in a full-page Richard Avedon photograph published by Harper's Bazaar in the January issue. The clothes-horsing magazine identified Manhattan-born Christina as a "Contessa" (she insists she is not), proudly admired "the classic spirit, abhorring the demure and falsely modest." But the photo was agitating the female press corps to its foundations. Tartly advised Syndicated Columnist Inez Robb: "The excursion into overexposure has unwittingly proved that not diamonds but clothes are a girl's best friend...