Word: avedon
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...Avedon's emotional scale is weighted decisively on the darker end. There are shots of redoubtable-looking ranchers and honey-faced teens, but almost no one ventures a smile. Far more typical is a picture of a vulpine carnival worker with a chilling gaze. A Texas factory worker, wearing a birthday corsage of dollars, even looks as if she knows that she will end up on a museum wall as an emblem for the empty promises of the working life. In case we miss the point, Avedon throws in three bloody head shots of slaughtered % steers and sheep...
This layer of society is relatively new to Avedon's camera, which is more commonly trained upon Nastassja Kinski's pout and Brooke Shields' rump. He has spent more than three decades at the pinnacle of fashion photography. But at the same time, he has perfected a mordant style of portraiture that mocks the earthly vanity his fashion shots glorify. The fixtures of that style are familiar: unsmiling figures shot in sharp focus against a plain white background. (Avedon started his career taking identity-card shots for the Merchant Marine.) The results can be pitiless. With every wrinkle...
...Avedon's ambition is to be, like Goya, both the royal chronicler and the social critic. But unflattering shots of the glamorous and privileged are one thing. How to cast that incinerating gaze upon ordinary people? Not one to swaddle his Western subjects in the gentle conventions of "concerned photography," he has persisted in his relentless inspection of bad skin, weak chins and glassy-eyed expressions. He also has resorted in places to cliched potshots, as in one picture of a nine-year-old cradling a gun. Yet he has given most of the people in these pictures ample means...
Above all, he has provided them with magnitude. Nearly all the images in the show are slightly larger than life-size; some are more than 6 ft. high. Avedon has worked in this scale before, notably in the mammoth prints shown at his 1978 retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Here size works to spare his subjects from condescension. These are not little cameos of dismay to be viewed at arm's length with the lips pursed. Facing figures of this dimension, hung so that their eyes are at or near eye level, the viewer...
Hence, "In the American West" is not primarily a social document at all, though at first glance it appears to be. Avedon is not absorbed by the reporter's task of showing how these people look and dress, or with acknowledging the full range of their emotional lives. Instead, against these blank white backgrounds he has projected the shapes of what appears to be his < own dejection, finding in each glum expression the corollary of a private somber mood. Yet the exhibition is also more than a magic-lantern display of the photographer's psychic woes. Looking through the lens...