Richard Avedon (1923–2004) at the age of nineteen while doing a two-year stint in the Merchant Marine (1942–4) used a Rolleiflex camera that his father had given him to make portraits of his fellow crew members for their ID’s. Thus launched one of America’s premier fashion photographers whose career spanned six decades and the commercial and artistic realms. He had grown up in New York City, and began college at Columbia, planning to
focus on poetry and philosophy. But he stayed only a year, joined the Merchant Marine, and when he was discharged, returned to New York.
Between 1944 and 1950, he studied at the New School for Social Research with Alexey Brodovitch, but soon transcended his student status to become a colleague, working with Brodovitch and Carmel Snow between 1945 and 1965 at Harper’s Bazaar. He left the magazine in 1965 to work at Vogue with Diana Vreeland and Alexander Liberman. He remained there until 1988, the year he was hired by The New Yorker as their first staff photographer. Famed for his imaginative poses and unsettlingly direct vision, Avedon established himself as a talented, imaginative, and hard-working photographer. The publicity he gained from his work in these iconic magazines made him famous in the commercial realm. Solo exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution (1962), the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (1970), and the Museum of Modern Art (1974) established his reputation as a fine artist of the first rank.
Avedon was a portraitist of exceptional talent, and he photographed many celebrities, producing striking high-contrast black and white images that reveal the essence of their character. The Avedon portfolio in the Solari Foundation Collection, printed in 1970, is comprised of eleven prints ranging in date from 1952 to 1964. The subjects represent a variety of celebrities. Avedon captures the aimless uneasiness of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who remained titled yet exiled from the country where he was briefly king. Charlie Chaplin, pointing his fingers from either side of his head as if they are horns appears amusingly devilish. The dour expression of Buster Keaton could hardly be characterized as comic, though Jimmy Durante’s malleable face is suitably humorous. Poets Marianne Moore and Ezra Pound have their eyes closed, as if concentrating on an inner vision. Danish writer Isak Dinesen is regally imperious, while actor Humphrey Bogart and director René Clair both have serious expressions. Avedon’s photograph of President Dwight D. Eisenhower conveys the banality of power.
Avedon worked in a highly formal manner, and his subjects are all posed against a plain light-colored backdrop that provides no context for their lives. Its anonymity gave his subjects a chance to recreate themselves in front of the camera. He regarded making a portrait as a collaborative project, observing in 1978: “A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows they are being photographed. A ‘sitting’ is an exchange of emotions. The picture emerges when these emotions meet.”1 He aimed to capture something of the psychology of his sitters in his portraits: “There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.”2
Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) is the most iconic figure in this group, and Avedon photographed her in his Madison Avenue studio. He observed of his subject in an interview with filmmaker Helen Whitney: “There was no such person as Marilyn Monroe,” rather she “was someone Marilyn Monroe invented, like an author creates a character.” When she showed up for her evening session, wearing high heels and a sparkly sequined halter gown with a plunging neckline, she was very much the glamorous beauty with whom the public was familiar. Avedon, who took a series of pictures as they talked (he was not a photographer who preferred to work in silence), waited for the right moment to present itself, and gave his subject a glass of white wine: “For hours she danced and sang and flirted and did this thing that’s—she did Marilyn Monroe.” There was a strongly theatrical quality to his practice, and Avedon encouraged his figures to move about the studio during their sessions, hoping that their motion might reveal something surprising. Several full-length views show Monroe vamping around his studio, dancing and laughing, her glittery long earrings swinging (they have disappeared by the final shot). He knew none of the pictures he had taken were quite what he wanted. But he was patient. Finally, when her manic energy was exhausted, he recalled “there was the inevitable drop…she sat in the corner like a child, with everything gone.” He shot one more frame: “I wouldn’t photograph her without her knowledge of it. And as I came with the camera, I saw that she was not saying no.”3
In an image that remains among his most notable portraits, Avedon captured Monroe’s vulnerability, giving a sense of the sweetly dark side of her character, one in which tragedy and beauty were intertwined. With keen insight, he revealed not the public person, but the private one, one somewhat baffled by her own celebrity: “You can only get beyond the surface
by working with the surface. I have great faith in surfaces. A good one is full of clues.”4 One of his subjects noted that Avedon “caught the moment that you never knew existed.”5 But like Monroe, they surely recognized themselves when they saw their portraits.
Betsy Fahlman
Richard Avedon, Marilyn Monroe, Actress, New York, May 6, 1957, Avedon (portfolio), 1970, gelatin silver print, 57.2 x 50.8 cm, SOLARI 91.015.010L