Word: avedon
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...definitive history -- one version of the story, splendidly but narrowly focused upon questions of style through the work of just 85 major figures. It would be possible to assemble another equally large exhibition from the prominent names left out -- Mathew Brady, Eadweard Muybridge, Ansel Adams and Richard Avedon, to name a few -- but the shortcomings of the show are paltry compared with its pleasures...
...ICHARD AVEDON, fashion photographer and portrait-maker, will be speaking tonight at the Fogg in conjunction with his latest project In the American West (co-sponsored by the ICA Harvard's Office for the Arts, and Harvard University Art Museum). Following are excerpts from a recent interview with Mr. Avedon...
...PROJECT: "It isn't about the West. It's about a photographer who went west to do Avedon portraits...
...paradox of these pictures is that their visual crispness masks the complexity of their message. Avedon's ultrasharp focus seems to promise minute disclosures. His blank backgrounds suggest elemental truthfulness. If this is not a straightforward picture of the West, what could be? But those optical certainties are a tease. Avedon makes that explicit in the foreword to a recently published volume of these pictures (Abrams; $40). "A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture," he writes. "The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part...
...most sophisticated of photographers, Avedon would be the last to claim that his pictures are the truth, the whole truth and nothing but. He expects no one to believe the glamour-drenched fantasies he constructs for his fashion pictures. But he also knows that in taking a camera out among ordinary people, he raises expectations of more resolute truth telling. Avedon is throwing those expectations back in the viewer's face. Sometimes it takes a fashion photographer to show that "realism" is art's subtlest cosmetic...