Word: avedon
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...Kawabata, who later won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the great Zen scholar, D.T. Suzuki; and a little afterward he found himself on a set where Akira Kurosawa was directing Toshiro Mifune in Drunken Angel. Very soon, every foreigner who landed in Tokyo?Somerset Maugham, Tom Wolfe, Richard Avedon, Philip Johnson?was calling on him to be shown around. Richie's shrewd, but forgiving, fascination with human quirks there gives us Truman Capote buying an "imitation geisha wig" and Kurosawa taking in a Fellini film without subtitles ("Gets in the way of the picture," the master pronounces). Francis Ford...
...Richard Avedon An Appreciation...
Before he became a man capable of taking those pictures, Avedon transformed fashion photography. Certainly he knew about elegance. His portrait of Marella Agnelli, with its plain sources in the swan-necked women of 16th century Mannerism, tells you that. But in the pages of Harper's Bazaar and Vogue he undid decades of the simply fashionable. What he offered in place of the chic was cheek. In one giddy series of pictures from 1962, he had Suzy Parker, one of the first supermodels, high-stepping it around Paris with Mike Nichols, a funny young couple...
...Avedon was also a peerless celebrity photographer. He knew that every portrait was a performance but that the performance could be a passage to something true. His picture of an exhausted, tentative Marilyn Monroe is an essential window into the sum of her predicaments. His shot of Charlie Chaplin making devil's-horns at the camera is an object lesson in economical wit. Accusations of communist sympathies were pushing Chaplin away from America; Avedon gives us the funnyman trying on his new role, the bogeyman...
...Avedon had started his career in the merchant marine, taking identity card shots. Years later, the bare format of an ID became an inspiration for his mature portrait style, one of the great aesthetic insights of the 20th century. It consisted of high-focus inspection of unsmiling faces against an arctic-white background. Under that light, the body capitulates. Every line and facial sag announces itself. He used that approach to photograph everyone from Abbie Hoffman to Rose Kennedy. But these pictures were not cruel. They were fearless, lucid and unsentimental. As a fashion photographer, Avedon took human vanity...