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The Art of Control: The Photography of Richard Avedon
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11415 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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4 / 1994 |
1,549 Words |
| Author
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Judith Bell
Judith Bell is an art historian and novelist based in
Arlington, Virginia. |
"All art is about control," photographer Richard Avedon has said, "the encounter between control and the uncontrollable." Ronald Fischer, Beekeeper (May 9, 1981), an image from the American West portrait collection--compiled summers from 1979 to 1984, when Avedon roamed the West "looking for faces he liked"--is typical Avedon. The sitter, exposed from bald head to beltline and smeared with queen-bee pheromone so the drones would alight where Avedon wanted them, exhibits a beatific calm akin to the medieval imagery of saints. Look closer and there is just the edge of something darker in the pale eyes that leech into the white paper. "The image existed in my imagination long before it became a photo," Avedon has said. "I had to find in the real world what began in my mind."
True to these visions of the mind, Avedon has, in a career spanning fifty years, helped to define an era in American visual culture. Over the last several years he quietly went about redefining his career. An Autobiography (Random House and Eastman Kodak), published in September 1993, is a massive nonchronological display that juxtaposes images from fashion, photojournalism, portraiture, snapshot, and collage--model Jean Shrimpton with a Vietnamese napalm victim, for example--in a sweeping narrative that cannot help but alter how one sees Avedon. "A photograph is like a word in a sentence," says Avedon. "The pictures put together become a sentence. And then they can become a paragraph. I've never been able to express everything I know about the subject in one photograph. By editing the pictures and interweaving them in an almost symphonic form, I have enough images to tell my full story."
Evidence: Richard Avedon, a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C., emphasizes his photojournalism. While examples of his fashion work-—begun at Harper's Bazaar under the legendary art director Alexey Brodovitch—and the portraits that reinvented the genre will be on view, the show focuses on his little-known documentary work done !or Life magazine during the late 1940s. Paid $25,000 at the age of twenty-six to shoot an entire issue on New York City, the photographer spent six months shooting on its streets. "At the end of six months I returned the money, put the pictures in an envelope, and never looked at them again," he has said. "My feeling was I was entering a tradition that belonged to Helen Levitt and Lisette Model and others, and I didn't want to be part of a school that already existed. I felt that my interests were different. It wasn't me."
Forty years later, looking at these images and other photo journalistic work from the
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