Word: avedon
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...WOULD DISPUTE THAT Harry Callahan has a reputation. He's a venerated name in postwar photography. What he lacks is a legend, the personal drama that turns a mere photographer into a cultural celebrity. Diane Arbus had her demons. Robert Frank has his melancholy. Richard Avedon has his glamour, so much of it that Hollywood turned his life into Funny Face. Callahan taught art school in Chicago and Providence, Rhode Island. Not much of a role there for Fred Astaire...
Adam Gopnik, a writer for the New Yorker, is exactly right when he says, in an essay in the catalog, that "the theatricality of Avedon's work" is not a barrier to authenticity but rather the path to a different kind of truth, which it reaches by inventing "a set of heightened poetic conventions." Avedon has never been interested in observing the rules of straight photography, in which the most honest picture is one that has been fooled with the least. He crops and retouches; he coaxes the sitter and takes multiple shots until the subject's self-presentation matches...
Among those ends is to convey the unwelcome news that the body capitulates over time, a task for which Avedon's icy style is ideal. Seen in his deadly light, the mortification of the flesh never looked so mortifying as in his portrait of Dorothy Parker, taken after she had steeped herself for decades in martinis and her own bile. Yet put aside the thought that she was rattling herself to pieces, and the very lines of her droopy complexion are as weirdly captivating as strange tattoos. Even if Avedon never had in mind Rilke's claim that "beauty...
...Avedon brought his camera to the Berlin Wall on the nights that thousands of people gathered on either side to celebrate its fall. The Whitney retrospective ends with the pictures he made there. Strobe-lit crowd shots full of wild spirits, they hint that freedom has its demented side and that the end of communism might unleash new terrors of its own. Are those pictures pure reporting, or are they artifice? And is this the right line of inquiry? Perhaps instead of worrying about where Avedon falls on the continuum between death and Dovima, we should recognize that his pictures...
Photography: As his Whitney retrospective reveals, Richard Avedon photographs others to make portraits of himself...