Word: avedon
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...have been partly to pre-empt those lines of attack that the Whitney show, which was organized by the photography historian Jane Livingston, includes hardly any of Avedon's fashion photography. And there is something valuable about looking at Avedon's work apart from what we know about the charmed kid who blew into the offices of Harper's Bazaar in the late 1940s and set the superexotic Dovima against a trio of dancing pachyderms. Nevertheless, Avedon the mordant portraitist cannot be understood without reference to Avedon the fashion photographer. From his work for Harper's and Vogue he learned...
...When Avedon brought this knowledge to portraiture, he unsettled people who suppose a camera captures the psychological truths of the sitter. To the contrary, an Avedon portrait is just as likely to be a record of the photographer's preoccupations and psychic distresses, in which the sitter plays an unknowing part. If his portraits are psychological studies, the psychology is his, and that, he admits, is why so many of them are so gloomy...
...they were no more than projections of the photographer's own dilemmas, Avedon's pictures would be less compelling than they are. His portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Samuel Beckett command attention because's Monroe's baffled abjection and Beckett's quiet endurance correspond to states of mind familiar enough to most people. And the affectless pictures of oil-rig workers and cowboys and drifters that Avedon made in the western U.S., a place that still holds some of its mythic power as a land of opportunity, are a powerful representation of everyone's worst fears of disappointment...
...girl with a beach ball advertising a resort in the Poconos, a moony frame from a romance comic. But by the time such things had been run through the loop from ad to art to ad again, they had become as invested with glamour as a photo by Avedon. The sheer pervasiveness of Lichtenstein's style rivals and maybe even exceeds Warhol's, even though, unlike Warhol, he kept his own distance from the ad industry as an artist and never offered himself to it as a celebrity. Thus for the young, Lichtenstein must seem to have been around forever...
...September 27, Tina Brown and her husband Harold Evans, president and publisher of Random House Trade Publishing Group, hosted a party at the New York Public Library to celebrate the publication of Richard Avedon's newest book. The usual suspects, leftovers from the '80s, were present in their sequined splendor, glorying in their celebrity...