Richard Avedon – författare

An exquisitely produced new publication of In the American West: Photographs by Richard Avedon, a landmark project of classic American photography First published by Abrams in 1985 in conjunction with the groundbreaking exhibition at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, the book is now available in this lush 40th anniversary edition.Richard Avedon was the greatest American photographer of his generation. For In the American West, he traveled for five years, meeting and photographing the ordinary people populating America’s most extraordinary landscape.The resulting book includes 103 meticulously printed black-and-white photographs, an essay by Avedon on his working methods and portrait philosophy, and a journal of the project by Laura Wilson. The reissuing of this legendary book, out of print for more than a decade, is a major publishing event in the photography world.

An unflinching exploration of aging from one of the twentieth century’s most influential photographers‘[Avedon’s] portraits … expose something more than skin deep; whole worlds are contained in these well-earned crags and crevices.’ –   The New York Times  For more than half a century, Richard Avedon sought to represent advancing age in the faces of the people he photographed. From his earliest years at Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue through to the twenty-first century, Avedon routinely and audaciously broke the rule of flattering public personalities in his portraits. Instead, he chose to highlight the onslaught of what he called the “avalanche of age,” dramatizing the universal experience of getting older.Accompanying a groundbreaking exhibition at The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University and The Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Immortal is the first book to delve into Avedon’s unflinching representation of aging throughout his career.This elegant hardcover volume features nearly 100 portraits of cultural luminaries, each printed in striking tritone, such as Michelangelo Antonioni, Truman Capote, Marcel Duchamp, Duke Ellington, Toni Morrison, Patti Smith, and Stephen Sondheim, as well as one of Avedon’s last self-portraits. Texts by a star-studded cohort of authors, including Vince Aletti, Adam Gopnik, Paul Roth, and Gaëlle Morel, shed new light on an under-represented element of Avedon’s practice. Thoughtfully edited and beautifully produced, Immortal testifies emphatically to the determination with which people confront the relentless advance of mortality.

In the early 1960s, Richard Avedon was commissioned by Harper''s Bazaar to create Observations, a column that consisted of a series of nine photographic essays. The subject of the first essay was John F. Kennedy and his young family, who sat for formal black-and-white portraits just three weeks prior to Kennedy''s presidential inauguration. Six images appeared in the magazine''s February 1961 issue.That same day, Avedon created more informal color portraits of Kennedy and his family at the Kennedy compound in Palm Beach. One of these images ran as the cover of LOOK magazine''s February 28 issue, with photographs by Avedon inside. Just before the magazine hit the newsstands and was delivered to over 6.5 million people, a set of photographs, comprised mostly of the LOOK images, was released by the White House and appeared in newspapers across the country.During his lifetime, Richard Avedon donated more than two hundred images to the Smithsonian Institution, including all of the photographs of the Kennedy family sitting for Harper''s Bazaar. Smithsonian curator Shannon Thomas Perich has culled more than seventy-five images from that donation for The Kennedys: Portrait of a Family, making these stunning photographs available for view for the first time. Perich''s introductory essay—accompanied by a wealth of archival photographs of both Avedon and the Kennedy family—provides historical background on the two sittings within a political and cultural context and critically examines the work of one of the finest photographers of the twentieth century. A foreword by Robert Dallek, distinguished historian and author of the bet-selling An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963, provides authoritative and compelling insight to one of the most fascinating presidents in American history.

Among the significant projects of the last year of his life, Richard Avedon (1923–2004) completed a book of his photographs of women. Always transcending categorization—he was both a fashion photographer and known as a “poet of portraiture”—Avedon was interested in seeing how elemental facts of modern life and human existence were reflected in his work. And what could be more elemental than women, who have mesmerized artists across the centuries?Looking at his work in this way, Avedon was able to create an unparalleled view of women in his time, a tumultuous half century of rapidly changing social facts, cultural ideals, popular styles, and high fashion. As an artist, Avedon was deeply responsive to nuances of expression, gesture, and comportment, and his photographs unfailingly opened a window to the interior lives of his subjects. These ranged from celebrities (Marilyn Monroe), artists (Marguerite Duras, June Leaf), and high-fashion models (Suzy Parker, Dovima) to anonymous people that simply drew his attention. Like the best of art and literature, they evoke rich lives and complex experiences.An incisive essay by art historian Anne Hollander offers an overview of a half century of Avedon’s images of women.