Word: portraited
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...Iraq's alleged arsenal will be remembered for the colossal misjudgments that cost him his rule. The exhaustive detail compiled by the report's author, Charles Duelfer, chief U.N. weapons inspector in the 1990s and the Bush Administration's top hunter since January, richly fills in the previous portrait of a paranoid and brutal dictator who believed that weapons of mass destruction (WMD) were the prime tools with which to advance his extravagant ambitions. Drawn from lengthy interrogations of the core Iraqi leadership and Saddam during their months in U.S. custody, the Duelfer report sheds fresh light on the dictator...
...work, showing the tactility of life that is left in those whose lives are accelerating towards being no more. Avery is a physician; his prints depict his patients, sufferers of AIDS. Here each moment seems to be of an expanded worth, as is the moment that his stark woodcut portrait squelched into the paper-pulp he chose as medium and soaked up the blackness of intention. As in “I won’t be no beast of burden” (Avery, woodcut 1999), in the instantaneity of the print is suspended an infinite expression of stillness, sympathy...
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...