The medium is the message.
–MARSHALL MCLUHAN
On the January 9, 1968, cover of Look magazine, John Lennon changes color before our very eyes—psychedelic red-orange on one side of his face, black-light purple on the other, his features outlined with a quicksilver streak of solarized light, all against an electric-yellow background. A swirl of undulating stripes vibrates within the frames of his round glasses, leaving the illusion that either he is tripping on LSD, or we are. While Lennon’s features are abstracted in a wild hallucinogenic display of color, at that cultural moment he was immediately recognizable. Still, the magazine identified him as “Beatle John Lennon by Avedon.” Not Richard Avedon. Simply Avedon.
Inside the magazine is a double foldout with full-page psychedelic pictures of each Beatle. Paul McCartney’s pastel countenance appears next to a bouquet of melting flowers; George Harrison, staring toward the heavens, holds his hand up in a spiritual pose, an eye drawn playfully on his palm; and Ringo Starr sits with a white dove perched on his finger.
Once Dick accepted the assignment, he and the Look editors met to figure out how he should photograph the Fab Four. The magazine wanted to reflect what was happening in contemporary life, especially with the younger generation. The Beatles, according to Avedon, had brought about a revolution in visual thinking: “The Art Nouveau influence, op-art, Eastern influences, painting bodies—these and many more elements were what we wanted to get into the pictures,” Avedon explained. “I went to England with this concept in mind but no specific idea of how to carry it out.”
Before the Beatles’ first trip to New York, in early 1964, their youth, their charm, their antic behavior, and their long hair had already set off a profound hormonal trigger for an entire generation of American girls. The combination of the group’s elementary rock and roll music, innocent love songs, catchy tunes, and refrains, along with their sweet harmonic voices, struck the precise anodyne note the world needed after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Four years later, on August 11, 1967, Dick photographed the Beatles in the studio of Antony Armstrong-Jones in London. It was not the first time he had photographed them, and he was struck by how enjoyable these sessions were, as each Beatle was more delightful and cooperative than the last. Their music continued to evolve into groundbreaking territory with each new album. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, their “trippiest” music to date, had been released earlier in the spring, changing, as it were, the collective tune around the world. All to say that the stakes for Avedon were also close to insurmountable.
Dick photographed them separately, each sitting lasting about an hour. The portraits were characteristic of his typical headshot style, photographed in black and white. Only Lennon was lit from the side, with one half of his face in shadow. Avedon had a rule against props in his portraits, but, in this case, he thought it made sense: op-art glasses for John; flowers for Paul; Indian Tantric symbols for George; and a dove for Ringo. Yet in the end, he was not happy with the results. “What I came back with was not what I call very interesting photography.”
He knew he had to do something, so Dick and his assistant Gideon Lewin embarked on an elaborate, four-month process of technical discovery. Once Dick gave Gideon his selection of the four portraits to work with, Gideon was darkroom-bound for days at a time, trying out a variety of wild card techniques to make the pictures more interesting. Lewin rephotographed the black-and-white prints with eight-by-ten Ektachrome color sheet film. He made tests with a variety of color filters. Every day he and Dick would discuss the inadequate results and consider other options. Lewin began experimenting with solarization, a process that Man Ray had discovered by accident in the early 1920s when he was processing film and someone opened the darkroom door; the flash of light on the developing film left a penumbra outline that appeared at the edges of the subjects in his pictures—the birth of the Rayograph. Lewin exposed the color negative sheets to flashes of light as they were being developed, resulting in tonal reversals, light streaks, and penumbras. The effects were exciting but unpredictable, and it took Lewin some time to figure out how to exert greater control over where the solarization occurred on the faces of each Beatle.
Next they played with the additional dimension of dye-transfer printing. The dyes used in this four-color process are the same as those used in fabric. Four plates are involved to make a single dye-transfer print, in which three color separations are transferred onto the paper. This technique yields the richest color and the most depth of any photographic printing process. While time-consuming and expensive, it gave Gideon the most control over the results. Lennon’s eyeglasses posed the gnarliest problem: the black-and-white stripes did not have the op-art effect in the context of the color image. Eventually, they combined a black-and-white negative and a color negative, so that the curved lines within the glasses were edged with green, just slightly off register. In the final dye-transfer, the pattern in the glasses was stripped in, creating a vertigo effect in the image. Avedon’s exacting vision required just this kind of vigilance, perseverance, and surgical rigor to achieve the astonishing effect.
Dick had never been interested in the technical minutiae of the photographic process and rarely, if ever, spent time in the darkroom with any of his assistants during their laborious experimentation. But he was always eager to see the results, and he was intricately involved in directing his assistants to lift the printed image to its highest possible resolution. “We were like a family working hard all the time for his creations, and that’s what we were there for,” Lewin said. “There was no such thing as ‘it can’t be done.’ He would tell me to go think about it again so we could talk tomorrow.”
Soon after the Beatles spread appeared in Look magazine, Dick published a poster with the four Beatles pictures in a single grid. The poster became ubiquitous in dorm rooms around the country, setting the tone for other rock posters, including the Woodstock rock festival poster in 1969, and seemed to be a lucrative, ongoing revenue stream that lasted for years.
Avedon’s sittings with the Beatles took place in August 1967, the same year Warhol made ten untitled Marilyn silk screens on canvas. Avedon was not copying Warhol so much as absorbing the very nowness of Warhol’s visual gesture, in this case creating perceptual dislocation with technical experimentation in the darkroom as Warhol had done by skewing the image with the silkscreen process on canvas. There is not a more visually articulate image to define the sex-drugs-and-rock-and-roll ethos of that period than Avedon’s “Psychedelic John Lennon,” in the same way that his “Flower Twiggy” had absorbed the peace-and-love movement of the same era. Of course, Avedon was solving an editorial problem while Warhol was—well—making art. Yet Avedon was being pushed into new territory, and one could say that his next body of work—which would aim for a much purer brand of technological hijinks—was nascent.
That same year saw the publication of The Medium Is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, by Marshall McLuhan. By then, McLuhan’s epigrammatic statement had already been infinitely parsed in the academy and in the press. The critic Harold Rosenberg referred to McLuhan as “a belated Walt Whitman calling the body electric with Thomas Edison as accompanist,” while Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. derided him as “a chaotic combination of bland assertion, astute guesswork, fake analogy, dazzling insight, hopeless nonsense, shockmanship, wise cracks and oracular mystification.”
Avedon might well have been McLuhan’s exhibit A. He, too, saw the mediums of the twentieth century—photography, cinema, television, and print journalism—as the driving agents of human evolution more than the ideas, stories, and visual representations conveyed in each form. Dick was vigilant about the optical detail in his photographs, and he had no compunction about pushing his assistants to bring the image to the furthest limits of what the medium could do. In the legacy of his achievement, he created “Avedon’s Marilyn” instead of Marilyn Monroe by Richard Avedon, “Avedon’s Nureyev,” and “Avedon’s Charlie Chaplin,” in the same way Andy Warhol created his “Warhol Marilyns” or “Warhol Jackies” or “Warhol Lizzes.” Form is content and content form; the medium is the message.
“I trust performances,” Avedon once wrote. “Stripping them away doesn’t necessarily get you closer to anything. The way someone who’s being photographed presents himself to the camera and the effect of the photographer’s response on that presence is what the making of a portrait is about.” The question wasn’t whether the portrait is natural or unnatural, only whether the “performance” is good or bad. “The surface is all you’ve got,” Avedon often said. “All you can do is to manipulate that surface—gesture, costume, expression—radically and correctly.”
Andy Warhol, too, was interested in the surface. As Warhol famously said (to ARTnews): “The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.” Warhol was referring to his newfound process of silk screen printing. This act of undermining any evidence of the artist’s hand in favor of a mass-produced look appealed to Warhol—despite the fact that his canvases were silk-screened in artisanal fashion, by his own and his assistants’ hands. Once he discovered the process and the implications of working with silk screen, the content of his output as a painter became inextricably linked to the process by which he created his art.
Avedon would soon begin with clear artistic intention—beyond the printed page—to photograph subjects of cultural significance and of his own choice with as much technical articulation and optical detail as the medium itself could yield.
IT ALL BEGAN WITH one set of mink breeders in the Great Lakes region of the United States. The black minks they had been cultivating were considered to have the richest and most lustrous fur in the world. The Great Lakes Mink Association (GLMA) wanted to spread the word, and in 1968 they approached Jane Trahey, who owned her own advertising agency on Madison Avenue, to launch a national promotional campaign. Out of the color of the mink, black, and the acronym of their regional organization, GLMA, Trahey came up with the brand name “Blackglama” and conceived a tagline for the national ad campaign—“What Becomes a Legend Most.” Henry Wolf, who had briefly replaced Brodovitch as art director at Harper’s Bazaar in the late 1950s and who worked closely with Avedon during that period, was Trahey’s art director. Together they created the successful campaign in which great stars of the stage and screen were adorned in luxurious black mink coats, a status symbol in keeping with their stature as legends. And who better to photograph these grande dames than Richard Avedon?
Peter Rogers, of the Trahey agency, was the account executive for the entire campaign. “What Becomes a Legend Most” consisted of a new full-page ad each month, each legend wearing a mink coat under the tagline, in a campaign that ran in all the major magazines. Each grande dame received a custom-made mink coat as payment.
The Trahey agency considered Dick to be as legendary as the women it wanted to include in the campaign. “We knew that if he took the photographs, the stars would all say yes, because they all wanted to be photographed by him—and of course they had all been photographed by him,” Rogers said. He was responsible for “casting” the legends, and Lauren Bacall was the first to be photographed. Others included Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland, Bette Davis, and Barbra Streisand. “Once the first five ran, the phone never stopped ringing with women wanting to be in it,” Rogers said. “The only women who ever turned me down were Jackie Onassis and Katharine Hepburn.”
It was not easy for Rogers to navigate the demands of so many divas. He picked up Lauren Bacall in a limousine, and on the way to Dick’s studio he showed her the contract. It stated unequivocally that she was to receive her mink from Alexandre, but, in the middle of the park, she seethed, “If the coat doesn’t come from Maximilian, you can turn the car around right now.”
When they got to the studio, she was, of course, a perfect angel. She and Dick had known each other forever, and he was friendly and nonchalant. Dick was getting only $1,000—about $7,000 in today’s terms—per shoot, each shoot taking not more than half an hour. As the campaign took off, his fee increased to $1,500—closer to $10,000 today. In the picture of Bacall, she stands wearing the coat in profile, her arms crossed, her face turned directly at the camera, her expression one of Medusa-like hauteur. In fact, the photograph is the result of pre-Photoshop studio wizardry. When the film came back to the studio, Bacall looked terrific but the coat itself was uniformly black, lacking definition and texture. Since it was an advertisement for the mink coat, it had to be rephotographed, but asking Bacall to come in for a reshoot presented too many problems. Gideon figured out a way to light the coat to reveal the hairs in the fur, and then Dick photographed the coat on his secretary, Sue Mosel, posing her in the exact position of Bacall. Dick gave the negatives of Sue Mosel and Lauren Bacall to Bob Bishop, his meticulous retoucher, who stripped Bacall’s head onto Mosel’s body. Now the fur was articulated and the hairs visible. Once this trick is revealed, one can see that Bacall’s head is larger than it should be in proportion to the body in the coat.
Rogers was present at all the sittings, not only delivering each star to the Avedon studio, but then working with Dick to get the right pose. Rogers found Dick to be easy to work with and at times surprisingly cooperative, given his reputation for exactitude and, at his worst moments, megalomaniacal control. “We weren’t photographing a design. We were photographing a style,” Rogers said. “And Dick was very important in establishing that campaign style.” Dick had photographed Marlene Dietrich on several occasions, going back to his first years at the Bazaar, and when Rogers brought her into the studio, she and Dick had an almost intimate rapport. She posed for a while, but it wasn’t quite working. Finally, she said, “Bring me the mirror,” and Dick, uncharacteristically, seemed willing to comply. His assistant brought out a full-length mirror and she looked at herself, then said, “Bring me the stool.” She sat down, crossed her legs, pulled the fur coat back, and voilà. “Everybody fainted,” said Rogers, indicating that it was not only a classic Dietrich posture, but perfect for the picture. Dick photographed her in just that seated pose, the fur coat draped to the floor like a curtain around her legs, one crossed over the other, with silver-tipped heels on her feet. That was the picture that appeared in the Blackglama ad. “It’s so great to have such famous legs,” Rogers said to her after the shoot. “They’re not so famous, darling,” she replied. “I just know what to do with them.”
Rogers embarked on an encumbered odyssey to locate Judy Garland for the campaign. He could never reach her on the phone, and she would never return his calls. Then, one night, quite serendipitously, he was at a lesbian bar with friends on the Upper East Side called Three. “I had been trying to find Garland everywhere, and all of a sudden, there she is standing at the bar,” Rogers said. “She was coming down every weekend from Boston and singing in this bar for a hundred dollars a night.” By then she was on several prescription drugs, and Rogers remembered her behavior as more than a little manic. She agreed to be in the ad campaign and then proceeded to call him collect from Boston at least twice a day in anticipation.
He picked her up at the airport on the evening before the scheduled session. She got off the plane wearing a red sequined pantsuit. He had made a reservation for dinner at the Colony, a society restaurant in New York, thinking that it would please her, but she was not interested. “No, we’re going to hear Tony Bennett at the Waldorf,” she said. She ordered one vodka after the other and sipped them throughout the evening. She sent Bennett a note with a rose from the vase on the table and when he came out, he said, “Before I sing, I must tell you all that the fabulous Miss Judy Garland is in the audi—” According to Rogers, she leapt up to the stage, took the mic out of his hand, and did an entire set. “It was astounding,” he said, meaning both her audacity and the performance. Later, they went up to Bennett’s suite, and around midnight Rogers reminded her that they had a shoot in the morning. She didn’t want to leave.
The next morning, he picked her up at her hotel, and the concierge told him she had ordered five hundred dollars’ worth of Carven perfume from the hotel drugstore, which he had to absorb as an expense for the shoot. Finally, he got her to Dick’s studio. Dick and Judy were old friends and the shoot went very well. In the ad, under “What Becomes a Legend Most,” she reclines in a leisurely pose, leaning on one arm, the plush fur collar wrapped elegantly over her shoulder. Dick made her look radiant, impeccably made up, wearing fine drop earrings, appearing every bit as glamorous as one would expect of Judy Garland.
“What Becomes a Legend Most” was wildly successful, within a year or two turning Blackglama mink into the most desirable fur in the world. The campaign continued for almost twenty-five years. Eventually, they ran out of true legends, although in the first few years the roster was impressive: Joan Crawford, Maria Callas, Elizabeth Taylor, Lena Horne, Beverly Sills, Diana Ross, Lucille Ball, Peggy Lee, Brigitte Bardot, Sophia Loren, Carol Channing, Lillian Hellman, Rudolf Nureyev, Diana Vreeland. Dick, who was so instrumental in the success of the campaign, stopped photographing the legends after the first year.
WHILE DICK TRAVERSED THE heights of celebrity in his studio, his family life was becoming increasingly problematic, with tragedy nipping at the barricades. The last time Dick would ever see his sister, Louise, was in January 1968. Her skin was ashen, her face bloated, her hair thinning and knotted. She had long been on a daily cocktail of Thorazine, Stelazine, and a half dozen other drugs. “Be a good girl,” he told her as he waved goodbye. Louise had entered the Rockland State Hospital as a permanent resident soon after Dick and Evie were married, in 1951. She had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and the hospital specialized in electroshock treatment and lobotomization. Dick’s mother, Anna, whose older sister, Sally—Margie’s mother—suffered from serious mental instability that may never have been properly diagnosed, remained vigilant about visiting her daughter twice a week, taking the bus from the city to Orangeburg, New York, and sitting with Louise in a unit where the door had to be locked from the outside so the patients would not run out into the hallways; in warmer weather, Anna would take Louise for walks on the hospital grounds. Healthier patients resided on the lower floors of the ward, and, at one stage, when Louise showed a little improvement and was told she might be ready for the ground floor, she had a relapse. It seemed that she felt safe at Rockland State, where, over the years, her condition deteriorated to the point that she had to be spoon-fed.
In the early years of her treatment, Louise was permitted occasional daylong visits home. Dick would send his mother to the hospital with a car and driver to retrieve his sister and bring her into the city. “I would meet them at Rumpelmayer’s,” Dick said, the once popular ice cream parlor on Central Park South. Anna would complain about Louise’s long silences on the drive down, and shrug in despair. Louise always ordered the same thing—a banana split—and then would wander off to a corner of the shop to pet the stuffed animals. Dick and his mother did not linger on the false hope of success with her treatment, but they huddled in reassurance that the hospital was the best place for her to be. Eventually she would wander back to the table and eat her banana split, licking the ice cream off the plate. They might take her for a brief stroll in Central Park before Anna made the trip back to the hospital with her and returned again to the city, alone.
Over the years Louise was diagnosed as low functioning, and eventually she spoke in nothing but a string of random obscenities. Visits were curtailed. One morning a couple of weeks after Dick’s final visit, Louise was found unresponsive in her bed. Dick and his mother were notified of her death with the unofficial conclusion that she must have had a heart attack. The hospital wanted permission to perform an autopsy, but Dick’s memory of photographing an autopsy in the merchant marine, and fainting afterward, put him off the idea. The cause of death seemed irrelevant, and he said no.
“Louise’s beauty was the event in our house,” Avedon told Helen Whitney in 1994. “Her shyness was never examined. My mother used to say: ‘Louise, with skin like that and eyes like that you never have to open your mouth.’ When I began to photograph in my adult years, all the models that I was drawn to and all the faces that I was drawn to were memories of my sister.” Dick would lament about his sister’s death that she was only forty-two. “I’d already done enough to Louise. I hadn’t done enough for her.” In a moment of enlightened self-awareness, he added: “I don’t think I ever really wanted to help her—I had my hands full trying to help myself.”
Louise’s death occurred at a time when things at home had been quietly, painfully unraveling. Parallels between Evie and Louise were mounting. While Mike Nichols considered Evie to be very attractive, citing her elegance and her great laugh, he told Norma Stevens that, as Evie became increasingly troubled, she reminded him of Nicole Diver, the mentally unstable wife—and former psychiatric patient—of Dick Diver, the protagonist of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night.
Mike Nichols claimed that he was Avedon’s best “non-strategic” friend, and during this period, Dick divulged to him the troubling condition of his marriage: He told Mike about a recent evening in bed when Evie was absorbed in the biography of Zelda Fitzgerald. Suddenly she put the book down and asked Dick if he thought she was going to become like her. (Zelda was diagnosed with schizophrenia by the time she was thirty and lived the rest of her life in a psychiatric hospital. Nicole Diver was based on Zelda.) Dick dismissed the comparison, but Evie challenged him. “How do you know? Are you F. Scott?” That night Evie told Dick she had been thinking of leaving him. “I decided to call her bluff,” Dick told Mike, saying to her, “Okay, let’s give it a try.” She said, “There are men around who’ve given me a try,” dropping the name Goddard Lieberson, who worked with Bill Paley at CBS, and then rattling off the names of several of her psychoanalysts as well. Dick said he didn’t know if any of it was true, but he was left with a sense of relief. “It let me off the hook,” he told Mike.
Evie’s behavior had become progressively erratic and disagreeable. Dick felt that she was trying to embarrass him in front of their close friends, but her behavior was, more likely, beyond her control. By then, Evie was a patient of Dr. Lothar B. Kalinowsky, a psychiatrist and pioneer in electroshock treatment. One evening the Bernsteins were coming for dinner, and Dick got home early to find Evie in the kitchen making the final preparations for the meal. She was still in her nightgown, and he asked her what she was planning to wear for the evening. “I’m dressed,” she answered. He told her to go upstairs and get properly dressed. After half an hour, the Bernsteins arrived and Evie made her entrance in a housecoat hanging open over the nightgown. Her hair was uncombed, and her face was without makeup. Dick turned to Lenny and, in front of Evie, said, “You see how my wife hates me. She blames me for the emptiness of her life in the fullness of mine.” Meanwhile, Evie was saying to Felicia, “Dick dressed me tonight especially for you.” Lenny called him the next day to ask what they were going to do about Evie. Dick assured him that he was doing everything that could be done, describing Dr. Kalinowsky and his electroshock therapy, even complaining about the cost.
One could say that Dick’s relationship to fatherhood was self-referential. He always provided the very best for his son, John, doing so in sweeping flourishes of magnanimity. John Avedon started talking about wanting to be a writer when he was eleven. He had read The Lord of the Rings and J. R. R. Tolkien was his current hero. That year Dick brought Evie and John along to Europe while he was shooting the fall collections, and, while in London, he learned that it was Tolkien’s birthday. “C’mon,” Dick said to John, “we’re going to Oxford.” Dick bought a cake and they were driven to Tolkien’s house. “To my complete chagrin and humiliation,” John would later tell a reporter, his father rang the doorbell. Tolkien was caught off guard by the unexpected strangers at his door, and at first claimed to be indisposed with a terrible cold, but soon enough, he was charmed by Richard Avedon and so touched by his son’s adoration that he invited them into his study, where he sat with them for half an hour to talk about writing.
Dick was consumed with his work, often traveling for periods of time, whether on a Vogue magazine shoot in the snowcapped mountains of Japan for almost six weeks, or to London for Look magazine, or to the Caribbean for a quick, three-day advertising shoot. When he was in town, he worked all day, and at night, it was always the theater, or the ballet, or the premiere of a friend’s new movie, or the opening night at the opera. He was not a consistent emotional presence for his son, nor, it turned out, was Evie a stable one. But Dick was just terrific at the fatherly grand geste.
In 1969, Dick provided a car and driver, courtesy of Vogue magazine, for Johnny, barely sixteen, to go to the Woodstock music festival, two hours north of the city. The poster promised “An Aquarian Exposition: 3 Days of Peace and Music.” In fact, hundreds of thousands of shirtless college-age kids sat on the ground for a rain-soaked weekend as the sweet, pungent smell of marijuana lifted the collective audience into a throbbing and hypnotic purple haze. Kinetic energy rippled through the crowd, all bobbing heads and swaying shoulders, as Jimi Hendrix; Joan Baez; the Grateful Dead; the Who; John Sebastian; Country Joe and the Fish; Blood, Sweat and Tears; and Ravi Shankar performed. Sometimes, it was great to have Richard Avedon as a father. And sometimes not.
That year, John had had enough of Phillips Exeter Academy, his boarding school in New Hampshire. According to Harry Mattison, an older friend, he and John had commandeered Dick’s study on the top floor of the Riverview Terrace house to map out plans for a free school. “This was the time of post-Summerhill educational effervescence—the idea of a different kind of pedagogy was in the air,” explained Mattison. They wanted to call it Robin Hood Re-learning. He made a sensible case to his parents for a school for him and other children of his parents’ friends, and they agreed, as long as he would raise the money himself. “John was really onto something and rearing to go. But then his father stepped in and took it over—the whole thing, not just the fundraising part—and that took the wind out of John.” Regardless, the money was raised and a teacher was found and John did not have to return to boarding school; instead, he, along with fifteen other students, took classes at home in his town house on Riverview Terrace for an entire school year. So while Dick had taken over the enterprise, John got what he wanted.
With Louise’s death, along with the slow disintegration of his marriage, Avedon undoubtedly grew more introspective. Maybe that is what inspired him to make a series of portraits of his father, Jacob, in the waning years of his life. In August 1969, Dick took John with him to Sarasota, Florida, and made a portrait of the three generations of Avedons: Jacob, standing between his son and grandson, wears a white shirt, a striped tie, and a checked houndstooth jacket. He stares into the camera with a proud, close-lipped smile on his face. John, just sixteen, with long hair and beard, looks solemn, a wild child of the 1960s. Dick appears in a partial view, the right side of his face peeking into the frame, his right eye a piercing bullet.
Dick grew to hate his father early in his life. Was it for thwarting his individuality with tedious conventional goals that did not apply to who he was? Tyrannizing him with impossible expectations? Making him feel like a failure at every turn? In his father’s eyes, nothing was ever good enough, and his constant taunt about Dick being a “no-goodnik” was damaging. Now, of course, the balance of power had shifted. Not only was Dick not a no-goodnik, he had more money than his father could ever have imagined in several lifetimes. Not only was he not a failure in the arena of intellectual pursuit, he was respected by the great thinkers of his time and he could count among his good friends the venerated writers and artists of his generation. In keeping with his father’s ethic about the obligations of manhood, Dick took seriously his responsibility to his family. By every outward measure of those bedrock conventions, Dick was a faithful husband and a caring father, which was more than he could say for Jack, his own father, who had struggled to support his family while Dick was growing up, eventually leaving his mother and moving to Florida in 1952. Having proved his father wrong many times over, he could level a sober and calculating eye on the parent who once had loomed so large.
What a Shakespearean undertaking it was, then, to attempt a series of clear-eyed portraits of his father in the deteriorating stages of his life and eventual death. While these portraits would become among the most significant series in his entire body of work, the existential exercise of staring his father in the eye over five years of visits was clarifying and, likely, motivating, too, for it was in this period that Avedon’s work came into artistic focus. Years later, toward the end of his own life, Avedon was circumspect on his motivation to make the father portraits. “I was in analysis then, off and on, and it occurred to me many years later that maybe photographing him was an act of hostility, shooting, killing him with my camera, watching him die with my camera.” Dick recalled one supposition he had floated by his analyst: “Could it possibly be that I was telling myself it was a kind of love, when, really, it was a kind of murder?”
IN THE LATE 1960S, several junior assistants—those who reported to Gideon Lewin—passed through Dick’s studio. One of them was Claude Picasso. Dick had photographed Claude and Paloma, Pablo Picasso’s children, in Paris in 1966, and when Claude, who wanted to be a photographer, ran into Dick in London in early 1968, Dick invited him to come work for him. “New York is the place to be,” Dick said. Claude worked for the Avedon studio for a year doing menial tasks as well as darkroom work—sweeping the floors, setting out breakfast for the staff, printing contact sheets from film that was couriered overnight from Paris while Dick was shooting the collections. And, because he spoke French, Claude was enlisted to translate the letters Dick received from Lartigue.
By 1968, Dick’s Lartigue project was going full tilt. “All my spare time in the past few months has been spent editing and working on the layouts of a new book by Lartigue,” he wrote to John Szarkowski in the summer of 1968. “I arranged to have all of his pictures printed, then went to Paris to edit from thousands of them. The book will be divided into seven decades—it’s absolutely incredible the amount of work he has done and the beautiful photographs buried in his files. You realize, of course, that it was you who brought us together, and I can’t thank you enough. When the book is completed, I’d love to show it to you.”
Viking Press was interested in the book, and Dick had begun working with Bea Feitler on ideas for sequence and design. Dick wrote to Lartigue on March 28, 1968, explaining the fluidity of his working process with Feitler: “We think, we talk, we changed our minds. We are excited one day about a layout and two days later make it better. It is the nature of our working together, and a habit that has come to us from years of working on Harper’s Bazaar and on the Beatles posters and many other projects.” He wanted to convince Lartigue to “let us follow our dreams about your work to the end. On the other hand, as we work together we must all agree.” Avedon could be saccharine in his cheerleading and audacious with his demands, at one point explaining to Lartigue that the only way to sequence the book properly was to bring all of Lartigue’s negatives and contact sheets to New York. His argument was that it would be vastly less expensive to make copy prints in his studio than to pay Photostat houses or printing labs. In that same letter, as a further lure, Dick blithely reported to Lartigue that someone had given him an idea for the title: “Diary of a Century.” “I don’t think that’s a bad idea at all,” Dick wrote. “They explained to me how a book of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s called ‘Witness to Our Time’ sold 50,000 copies, because it was promoted as an historical book rather than just a collection of photographs.”
Another studio assistant that year was a young Brit named Neil Selkirk. Gideon hired Neil for a week in London, where Dick was scheduled to photograph John Huston’s wife and children at home on Maida Avenue. Dick knew Ricki Huston quite well, the former Enrica Soma, a principal dancer at the New York City Ballet under George Balanchine in the late 1940s. When the Avedon team arrived at the Hustons’ house, Selkirk, barely twenty-one, was struck by the unusual artifacts and mementos on the long refectory table in the middle of the director’s living room. African figurines sat on shelves; voodoo dolls hung on the walls; shelves of Indian pottery lined the dining room; and a photograph of a nudist family was framed on the wall in the corner. It was unusual to see a picture by Diane Arbus in anyone’s home in 1968, and Selkirk didn’t know who she was at the time. “I am not a person who is devastated by art,” he said. “I have never been moved by anything in my life before or since as much as I was by looking at this picture. I was ravaged.”
Dick made environmental portraits of Ricki and her children—Anjelica, Tony, and Allegra—and within an hour he was off to the next assignment. As they drove away, Gideon told Dick that Mick Jagger was not able to be photographed while they were in London, and Dick said, dismissively, “Well, he’ll just have to come to New York, then.” The young Selkirk was amazed at Dick’s nonchalance about photographing Jagger, who, by that time, had already achieved international rock star fame.
Selkirk would work briefly for Avedon in New York, but ultimately he became Hiro’s assistant. Dick’s larger studio was on one side of the building, and Hiro’s on the other. The agent Laura Kanelous represented both of them. The financial arrangement was lopsided in that Hiro paid 25 percent of his commercial income to Kanelous, just as Dick did, but Hiro also paid the Avedon studio a sizeable percentage of his income for use of the space and in-kind services.
Dick, who was working more than seems humanly possible, considered his commercial work the means with which he could fund his own work. He was obsessive about doing whatever it took to make as much money as he could squeeze out of every commercial or editorial project he accepted. To this end Avedon and Hiro had the cosmetics industry completely wrapped up, with advertising accounts for Chanel, Coty, Max Factor, and Revlon. Avedon might have been making twice as much money from Hiro’s labors, but Hiro, too, was making twice as much money as he would have on his own. He knew it would be professional suicide to leave and try to compete with Avedon for those accounts.
In 1969, Harry Mattison, initially Johnny’s friend, who eventually became a “son” of the Avedon household, began working as an assistant in Dick’s studio. He was a student at Fordham attending classes at night and needed a job. Dick offered him a job to be supervised by Gideon at $48.59 a week. “The first time I walked into the studio I was dazzled by all the white—it was like walking into a frosted lightbulb,” he said. “There were rolls of paper on the floor everywhere, and Dick shooting in the soft explosions of the flash were like that final spray of fireworks on the 4th of July.”
Soon after Harry started working at the studio, Dick was setting up another epic fashion excursion for Vogue—this one on American fashions, to be shot in the romantic Irish countryside. Not long after he photographed the Hustons in London, Ricki Huston was killed in an automobile accident. “Dick sent us violets,” Anjelica Huston said. “He was very sweet and attentive after she died. He loved my mother very much. You know, I think also because she was a swan, and he loved his swans.” Anjelica, who spent most of her childhood at her parents’ estate in Ireland, where she attended school, was seventeen, and soon after the accident, she left London for New York. Dick, who had watched her grow up, had done a modeling test of her when she was fifteen. She had already modeled for several other fashion photographers in London, and now following Ricki’s death, Dick called Anjelica and asked her to be the model for the twenty-five-page fashion romance in the Irish countryside for Vogue.
Dick had photographed several male models to be considered as the male romantic figure in the Irish fantasy, including James Taylor—before his breakthrough single, “Fire and Rain.” In the studio Avedon also had taken notice of Harry Mattison, who was twenty-one, tall, blond, and handsome. He asked Harry to sit for some test shots, and then showed them, along with pictures of James Taylor, to Anjelica Huston. She picked Harry, and off they all went to Ireland for two weeks of shooting, in an entourage with Dick, Gideon, the two fashion editors Polly Mellen and Babs Simpson, and Ara Gallant.
The feature ran in the October 15, 1969, issue of Vogue as a series of romantic idylls amid the poetic Irish landscape, with scenes of Anjelica holding an open umbrella while riding a bicycle in the rain; Anjelica and Harry huddled in a painted tinker’s wagon pulled by white horses; the two of them in languid repose in front of an ancient castle, romping in the fields, strolling along the beaches, staring longingly at each other, reading aloud to one another. In one picture, Anjelica wears a long wool cape and holds a majestic eagle, with wings spread, on her gloved hand. In one jarring moment on that trip, Dick and Harry had gone to the house of the falconer from whom they had rented the eagle. There in the glass case of his living room was a glaring display of Nazi memorabilia. “Dick was clearly shaken,” Harry recalled. “When we left, he mumbled something about calling Simon Wiesenthal right away.”
Dick liked to play games, Anjelica remembered, silly games to pass the time. “What would it be like if you had the biggest penis in the world?” he would say, throwing the question out as a challenge. And someone would take the bait. “Oh, it would be fabulous. You’d have such a great time.” He would counter with, “But wouldn’t it be a nightmare?” Anjelica thought he was being provocative. “I always felt that he came at it as an observer, not as a participant,” she said. “There was a certain kind of collegiate, gray-cashmere thing about Dick, a correctness about him, and, also, a kind of cool.”
For Anjelica, there was nothing like modeling for Vogue with Dick, Diana Vreeland at the helm. “It was just fantastic,” she said, speaking of this extended adventure in Ireland. “There was no folly too great. No extravagance too much. Hundreds of pairs of shoes, thousands of scarves, belts, gloves, dresses, editors running around all highly emotional. Polly Mellen, the most emotional of all.” Anjelica’s description of modeling for Dick is consistent with that of other women, who also experienced the unique “addiction,” as Huston characterized it. “It’s really an extraordinary thing when that synergy happens, because it’s so exciting. It’s like flying. You get into a rhythm and you see what he wants and you understand, and you’re giving it back to him and it’s . . . a wonderful two-way conversation.”
She preferred it when he used the Rolleiflex instead of the Hasselblad, which took forever to load. She had to freeze in position while the magazine (film holder) was changed. She felt more spontaneous in front of the Rolleiflex. “I remember, at one point, he had us chasing around some haystacks and rolling around in the hay. You know, there was no room for self-consciousness.”
Aside from a few dissonant moments, as with the falconer, it was a lovely trip for all of them. Anjelica remembered beautiful drives on country roads as they listened to music as diverse as Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Bob Dylan’s “Lay Lady Lay.” Harry remembered drinking Irish whiskey in one town with locals who had gathered to watch the moon landing on a small television on the bar. Dick must have felt a kind of camaraderie with Harry, because the two were in a pub alone late one evening and, according to Mattison, he unburdened himself about the tensions between him and Evie. “Dick shared with me a lot of his terrible ambivalence about this marriage. He told me that he was suffering, and that Evie was, too, which I already knew from her. He just wanted me to know that he was trying to come to a decision and that it was very difficult. And in fact he didn’t leave Evie until a couple of years later.”
The trip to Ireland proved to be a great success in the halls of Vogue. Just before the issue was published, Mrs. Vreeland sent a note to Dick, as well as to Babs Simpson and Polly Mellen: “I think it looks so divinely beautiful. All the romance of the countryside is within the pictures. I think the clothes were so beautifully selected, so beautifully used. From every point of view everyone involved in this gets the warmest and highest congratulations. I’m absolutely thrilled with it.”
WHILE THE FANTASY ESCAPADE in Ireland had been business as usual at Vogue, America was being torn apart. The year before—1968—had been tumultuous. Two assassinations—Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy—plowed into the tender moral fibers of the national conscience. Outrage and despondency, both, propelled mass demonstrations and inner-city riots across the country, erupting with parallel and sometimes overlapping intentions—civil rights demonstrators on one side, antiwar protesters on the other. The 1968 presidential election would be a bitter referendum on the Vietnam War, which was escalating even as resistance to it grew ever more visible, vocal, and militant. With the antiwar movement taking hold, demonstrations became larger and more frequent; and the militarized police reaction would have an adverse effect, like throwing oil on a fire.
In August 1968, the Democratic National Convention in Chicago attracted thousands of antiwar protesters, including members of the more militant activist groups: the Youth International Party (the Yippies), Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and the Black Panthers. The convention was televised, and so was the apocalyptic clash between the protesters and the Chicago police, who used tear gas and billy clubs to beat back the crowds of student-age demonstrators whose parents—along with the entire world—were watching in abject horror.
This may or may not have been the incident that crystallized for Dick a clear path out of what he felt to be an artistically fallow period. Certainly he had been successful at upping the ante as a fashion photographer, each new year bringing another set of visual innovations to the pages of Vogue. His creative intelligence kept him in the spotlight and continued to attract commercial clients. But since the hostile reaction to Nothing Personal, he had found himself at an aesthetic crossroads. His portraiture felt stale. “I had this block,” he later recalled about that period. “I couldn’t photograph—well, I could photograph, but I couldn’t do anything that meant anything to me for a great number of years.”
John Szarkowski, the curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, who had organized the New Documents show with Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, and Garry Winogrand, made several visits to Avedon’s studio in 1968. A man not easily impressed, or persuaded, he must have thought well of Avedon’s work because he offered him a show at the museum, arguably the most prestigious platform for photography anywhere in the world. This might have been exactly the impetus Dick needed to bring focus to the next stage of his work. He even said as much to Szarkowski: “I can’t tell you how grateful I am for your offer,” he told the curator. “It comes at the most needed moment.” Yet he was also circumspect, telling Szarkowski that he thought it would be best to wait and show a body of work that he had not yet even begun. To that end, the photographer and the curator began a dialogue about the work in progress that would last another five years. In one of the first conversations they had, which was in written correspondence, Dick’s enthusiasm got the better of his circumspection, as it was wont to do: “You know my compulsion about not doing any formal presentation of my work until I complete the ‘room’ for you,” he writes to Szarkowski. “Well, I am beginning to think I need the discipline of a deadline, and so, have accepted a large retrospective show at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts for the fall of 1970, which means that I will have your show of new work done before then.” He goes on to say that the Minneapolis museum will assume the expenses for all the prints and the framing of his work that will be returned to him when the show is over. It took Szarkowski several months to respond, apologizing for the delay, expressing delight that Dick was doing serious thinking about “our show,” as he called it. It is possible to read a facetious note between lines here, as Szarkowski could speak in double meanings that were always couched in decorum: “Let us get together for lunch as soon as we can, so that you can re-energize me with your good ideas.” That Szarkowski needed to be “re-energized” at all suggests the beginning of a weariness about Avedon himself, if not his work.
Alert to the upheavals occurring not just in the United States but also in Paris with the student riots, and in Eastern Europe with the Prague Spring, Avedon believed that a significant political shift was taking place, and he wanted to document it, or, more in keeping with his chosen genre, portraitize it—with a new style that was conceptually matched to what Paul Roth, a former director of the Richard Avedon Foundation, described as “the disruptive and transgressive energies then animating and shaping American culture: a series of portraits documenting the American counterculture and radical left.”
There is no question that Marvin Israel was egging Dick on toward a freer and more confrontational visual style. In 1969, Israel recommended that Avedon hire the young writer Doon Arbus, the daughter of their mutual friend Diane Arbus, to help him with this new venture. Doon had gone to Reed, an intellectually rigorous progressive college in Oregon, but left after her freshman year. She worked as an assistant to Gloria Steinem, then wrote a few pieces for the New York Herald Tribune Sunday magazine, and now, at the age of twenty-four, she was writing for Cheetah, an alternative publication. Dick hired her to assist in targeting and scheduling subjects for him to photograph, and to conduct interviews with the sitters that would accompany the pictures. Avedon assigned a working title to his new project: “Hard Times.” Years later, in a recorded interview with both of them, Doon recalled the way Dick first described the project to her: “You were clear on what you wanted to do,” she remembered. “It was an emotional thing and also something political. . . . You wanted to photograph people who were putting themselves on the line. As it evolved, it got less and less structured by that. But that was the initial thought.”
Dick was never shy about promoting his projects, and somehow, barely a month later, an item showed up in the Village Voice announcing that Richard Avedon “now wants to turn his lens on something funkier, and more responsible, than the Paris collections. He and writer Doon Arbus have begun compiling an anthology of portraits of members of the Movement. ‘The quality of life is what we are researching,’ Avedon told the Voice. ‘Not just the Movement . . . survival, how people survive and what they consider important to themselves right now.’” The article reports the working title, “Hard Times,” and described their idea for a MoMA show “to mount all the photos (at least 1000) to the same size and cover the walls with them.”
On February 16, 1968, well over a year before the idea for “Hard Times” surfaced, Dick photographed Senator Eugene McCarthy, a Democratic presidential candidate who was running on an antiwar ticket. A “Talk of the Town” piece in the New Yorker reported on the presidential hopeful’s day in New York, describing the session in Avedon’s studio, as well as a press conference and a fundraiser. “There are no standard photographic props—no floodlights, spotlights, tripods or tangles of wire,” according to the piece. Dick wore a brown sweater and gray flannels and stood with his Rolleiflex flanked by three assistants: one held a gray umbrella with a small pale light attached; a second held a sheet of cardboard, shielding the camera from the light; and the third held a freshly loaded Rolleiflex ready to hand to Dick when it was needed. McCarthy, “handsome in the style of a cowboy movie actor,” wore a gray suit, a white shirt, and a black tie with blue stripes. He sat on a stool and faced the camera, his hands folded on his knees. The senator and the photographer talked quietly, Dick asking questions and McCarthy answering softly in his usual temperate manner, while Dick clicked the shutter and the umbrella light flashed each time, illuminating the senator’s face. The session continued for less than an hour as Dick conversed with the presidential candidate, making several dozen exposures. This would be one of the last of a breed of stationary portraits before Dick embarked on his new approach—a more intentionally activated form of portraiture.
As Avedon embarked on his “Hard Times” project, the shift in his style can largely be attributed to his adoption of a new Deardorff eight-by-ten view camera. Until then, he had made most of his images—fashion and advertising as well as portraiture—with a Rolleiflex medium-format camera. Over time he tired of the smaller twin-lens camera, which required him to look down through the viewfinder and away from the subject. He felt it had become a barrier: “They couldn’t see my eyes, and I couldn’t see them. I saw them as a picture. And I felt as if the human connection was lost.” The Deardorff, by contrast, allowed Avedon more direct eye contact with the subjects. Standing to the side of the large camera, freed from technical matters by the presence of an assistant, he was able to forge a more immediate and intimate relationship with the person he was photographing. He could thus direct the sitting, subtly controlling facial expressions and body posture, and capture, in his words, “a kind of tension . . . a particular quality of proportion within the frame and the kind of spatial balancing and emotional tone.”
At the Democratic National Convention in August, Vice President Hubert Humphrey, not Eugene McCarthy, was nominated for the presidency. Outside the convention center, after the violent clashes with the police subsided, eight political activists were arrested for inciting the protests. The defendants included David Dellinger of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam; Rennie Davis and Thomas Hayden of the SDS; Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, founders of the Yippies; Bobby Seale of the Black Panthers; and two lesser-known activists, Lee Weiner and John Froines. They would become known as the “Chicago Eight.”
A year later, and a month after Dick’s return from his fashion shoot in Ireland, he went to Chicago to attend the trial of the Chicago Eight, which began on September 24, 1969, in the courtroom of Judge Julius Hoffman (no relation to Abbie, one of the defendants). The group had been charged with conspiracy to cross state lines with intent to incite a riot. All but Bobby Seale were represented by William Kunstler, who, among other distinctions, was at the time the director of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Leonard Weinglass, a cochairman of the National Lawyers Guild. The trial, presided over by Judge Hoffman, turned into a national platform for the defense attorneys; aware that it was being covered on national television news nightly, they attacked Nixon, the war, racism, and oppression in their defense arguments. Their tactics were disruptive in a courtroom already riddled with conflict and chaos. At one point, after Judge Hoffman refused to allow Bobby Seale to hold his own counsel, Seale declared before the jury that the ruling was illegal and unconstitutional, citing US Supreme Court precedent. Judge Hoffman ordered Seale to be gagged and strapped to his chair, and Seale could be heard in muffled sounds as he struggled to get free. Finally, the defense attorney Kunstler declared, “This is no longer a court of order, Your Honor, this is a medieval torture chamber.”
When the trial ended in February 1970, Judge Hoffman found the defendants and their attorneys guilty of 175 counts of contempt of court and sentenced them to terms of between two and four years. Although declaring the defendants not guilty of conspiracy, the jury found all but Froines and Weiner guilty of intent to riot. The others were each sentenced to five years and fined $5,000. However, none served time, because in 1972, a court of appeals overturned the criminal convictions, and eventually most of the contempt charges were dropped as well.
On the second evening of the trial, Dick set up a white backdrop in his Chicago Hilton hotel suite and organized a fundraiser, inviting the defendants, their attorneys, and anyone else he and Doon could rally to contribute to the legal defense. He photographed people talking to each other with drinks in their hands as they stepped into the frame, trying for as much spontaneity as possible given the confines of a timed exposure on the structured makeshift white “proscenium.” In one portrait, William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass stand in profile in conversation, their hands almost meeting between them as Kunstler aims his finger at Weinglass to make a point. During the party, Avedon made characteristic straight-on portraits of some of the defendants—David Dellinger, Rennie Davis, Lee Weiner, John Froines, Abbie Hoffman. He had already photographed Hoffman and Jerry Rubin in New York before the trial began. “Dick was looking at people forensically,” said Paul Roth. “Doon was interviewing the subjects, often at the same time as Dick was photographing them. Sometimes people were walking in and out of the frame. Sometimes you see Doon’s microphone sticking into the frame.”
Back in New York, Dick participated in an antiwar protest at Riverside Church, where he appeared among a roster of public figures and political activists to read aloud the names of 44,000 American soldiers killed in Vietnam since the war had begun. “The Vietnam Memorial Reading was born of the conviction that we cannot remain silent for one more day,” said one official of the event. The Times reported it as a solemn reading of the names of American soldiers killed in Vietnam “that will continue at Riverside Church 13 hours a day until the war ends.” Among the many readers were Avedon, Leonard Bernstein, Lauren Bacall, Leontyne Price, Republican senator Charles Goodell of New York, and a young representative, Edward I. Koch.
Avedon returned to Chicago to make what constitutes his first official wall-size mural portrait: The Chicago Seven: Lee Weiner, John Froines, Abbie Hoffman, Rennie Davis, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, Dave Dellinger, Chicago, Illinois, November 5, 1969. He had sketched out their positions beforehand for what would be a triptych by any other name, three frames in which several of the seven subjects at a time straddle the lines between one frame and another, effectively uniting the images and making them of a piece, with the continuity of a frieze—or a ragged police lineup.
Lee Weiner and John Froines occupy the first frame, with half of Abbie Hoffman’s body spilling into their visual space. In the center frame is Rennie Davis sandwiched between Hoffman on the left and Jerry Rubin on the right. As if in a narrative stutter, Rubin’s right shoulder and arm glide into the last frame. There is an empty space between Rubin on one side and Tom Hayden and Dave Dellinger on the other. According to Avedon, the space was intended for Bobby Seale, the original eighth defendant, a cofounder and chairman of the Black Panther party, who was unavailable because he was in jail. “For many observers,” Louis Menand writes in an essay about the mural, “Seale’s name on the indictment confirmed a suspicion that conspiracy was simply the longest statutory rope the government could find to lasso every prominent dissident who happened to be in Chicago at the time of the convention and drag them all into federal court.”
As Menand concludes about Avedon’s portrait, “the defendants known as the Chicago Seven look like ordinary men. They don’t seem mad, or bad, or dangerous to know. They’re not threatening or defiant. They look tired and sad, a little geeky, people you might run into in the teacher’s lounge or at the laundromat. . . . They had experienced one of the most spectacular judicial railroadings in the history of a nation that has seen a few of them.” When Avedon exhibited the mural-size image of the Chicago Seven the following year, he called them “heroic,” and said that they made him feel ashamed about his own failure to be more politically active.
On January 14, 1970, a private gathering at Leonard and Felicia Bernstein’s elegant Park Avenue duplex in New York would have lingering reverberations for the various progressive movements erupting across America. The Bernsteins’ fundraiser for the Black Panthers was memorialized by Tom Wolfe in a New York magazine cover story entitled “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” a scathing indictment of the moral and financial support being offered to “radical” social causes by “New Society” liberals, those socially prominent—and mostly Jewish—wealthy “arrivistes” on the Upper East Side. Wolfe turned his lacerating wit, precision-cut observations, and, perhaps, his not-so-subtle anti-Semitism on the hypocrisies he perceived to be emanating from these quarters: “Do the Panthers like little Roquefort cheese morsels wrapped in crushed nuts this way?” he ponders, describing the Black Panthers in attendance with their leather pieces, their Afros and shades as they are served canapés “on gadrooned silver platters by maids in black uniforms with hand-ironed white aprons.”
Among the ninety guests were Dick and Evie Avedon, the Sidney Lumets (Sidney was remarried to Gail, the daughter of Lena Horne), Adolph and Phyllis Green, Jason Robards, John and D. D. Ryan, Gian Carlo Menotti, Schuyler Chapin, Goddard Lieberson, Mike Nichols, Lillian Hellman, Larry Rivers, Aaron Copland, Milton and Amy Greene, Lukas Foss, Samuel Barber, Jerome Robbins, Stephen Sondheim, Betty Comden, and Charlotte Curtis, the very social style reporter for the New York Times whose article the following day, “Black Panther Philosophy Is Debated at the Bernsteins,” was the dirty bomb that wrought unpleasant havoc for anyone who was giving parties not only for the Panthers, but also for the farmworkers’ union and Friends of the Earth.
A day after Charlotte Curtis’s piece, the Times weighed in with a lead editorial, in which they declared in high moral dudgeon that “the group therapy plus fund-raising soirée at the home of Leonard Bernstein, as reported in this newspaper yesterday, represents the sort of elegant slumming that degrades patrons and patronized alike. It might be dismissed as guilt-relieving fun spiked with social consciousness, except for its impact on those blacks and whites seriously working for complete equality and social justice.”
It might seem like a victory that the controversy did not prevent others from planning fundraising parties, but the recriminations did not cease. Leonard Bernstein was getting booed while conducting the Philharmonic. The entire episode was complicated with paradoxes at every turn. Limousine liberal is the term coined by Tom Wolfe to describe the hypocrisy of asserting sincere good intentions about social justice while maintaining a lifestyle that exploits the underclass, and the Bernsteins and the Avedons and their entire cohort, in Wolfe’s incorrigibly damning essay, were exemplars of this crime. Still, it is too tempting not to give the last word to Randall Jarrell, the poet and literary critic, not as justification, but rather as a kind of philosophical aside: he suggested that you first have to arrive at a level of moral sophistication “where hypocrisy is even possible.”
WHILE THE CHICAGO SEVEN was Avedon’s first completed wall-size group portrait, he had already begun another group portrait that would take longer to complete. In April 1969, Avedon made a portrait of Andy Warhol that showed the gunshot wounds from his attempted murder by Valerie Solanas, who a year earlier had walked right into the Factory and shot at him three times. One of the bullets tore through his body and almost killed him. Avedon photographed him in a manner quite similar to that of the Blackglama campaign portraits. Warhol stands in front of a solid gray backdrop and faces the camera, dressed in a leather jacket unbuttoned from the bottom up. Displayed is one nipple aligned directly below Warhol’s face and two diagonal sets of dark stitches on the tender white flesh of his belly. One hand pulls the line of his underwear down enough to reveal a small, deep gash in his lower abdomen; his other hand rests awkwardly on his hip. The expression on his face is one of astonishment, his eyes staring directly into the camera and his mouth gaping open, as if he might be mocking the very reaction of the viewer looking at his wounds. One might easily call the Avedon portrait “The Martyrdom of Andy Warhol.”
Early into his thinking about the “Hard Times” project, Dick felt that members of the Warhol Factory might prove an ideal surrogate for the sexual revolution. The flamboyance of the Warhol coterie had by then long attracted relentless media attention, in particular because of their comings and goings at Max’s Kansas City, a restaurant and nightclub made famous precisely because of regulars like the Andy Warhol “superstars” Viva, Candy Darling, and Holly Woodlawn. At the time, pop art was focused on the iconography of popular culture. Given that Max’s had become a nexus of artists and rock and roll musicians, nightlife in the club’s legendary back room was a Satyricon-like display of sexual antics and after-hours revelry. The Warhol retinue was instrumental in paving the way for what would become known as the LGBTQ community—lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and (much later) transgender and queer (or questioning) people. The seductive, sexually frank tone of the song “Walk on the Wild Side,” written by Lou Reed of the Velvet Underground, a band associated with the Warhol Factory, is a paean to this transgressive group in the back room at Max’s.
“I wanted to start with the Warhol group,” Avedon said, “because I felt they were professionals and they loved their exhibitionism, and they love to pose, and they would cooperate.” On August 14, 1969, Warhol arrived with an entourage of thirteen people. Avedon tried to pose the entire group as they milled about the set. Above them, at the top of the frame, he incorporated his studio lights, fitted with umbrellas as reflectors. “One of the things I would try to do was show the studio,” he later explained, in an attempt to break the fourth wall. His intention to break the fourth wall—or, in this case, the surface—was a radical idea in photography, something that can never actually be done, although Dick’s exploration is an attempt to test the capacities of the medium, and equally challenge the nature of perception.
Avedon made ninety-one exposures at this first session with Warhol and his entourage before realizing that the sitting was a failure. Yet it would not stop him from further exploring the actions of individual Factory members: Brigid Berlin, for example, stripped off her shirt at the start of the session; Candy Darling, Jay Johnson, and Joe Dallesandro had, as Paul Roth writes, “provided unimagined varieties of beauty and sexuality” that Dick wanted to further explore. He kept moving the subjects around on the set, directing them and switching them around as would a stage director and choreographer. Still, he was unsatisfied and asked them to return for a reshoot.
On August 29, Warhol returned with some of the first group and a few new Factory faces. While Dick felt that there were too many people, he started photographing them in smaller groupings, and making pictures of certain individuals alone. This sitting, too, was a failure insofar as it did not yield a single good image, but he considered it progress because of the ideas it generated. As individuals, they were exotic, some more overtly erotic than others, and all of them together composing an exhibitionistic lineup representative of the red-hot nowness of the era. He was struck by their casual nudity. He wanted to play with “the beautiful garbage of clothes that are dropped” when they strip, elements he hoped to incorporate into the final picture.
He started to think about paintings throughout the history of art, in which groups are presented in ceremonial situations, sometimes lined up across the canvas, such as a painting by Frans Hals and Pieter Codde called The Meagre Company, a Dutch militia group portrait (1633–1637). The soldiers are not in uniform; rather they pose in flamboyant finery in an informal lineup, rendered full length, some peacocking in haughty postures, others talking among themselves, the entire group rendered with a casualness at odds with formal seventeenth-century painting.
Avedon was not known to reshoot his subjects, but he conceptualized these first two sittings with the Factory as if casting sessions that allowed him to determine which members of the entourage would best represent the character of the group. In the third sitting, on October 9, he focused on only the center panel of the triptych, inviting a select group back to the studio to experiment: Brigid Berlin, Joe Dallesandro, Gerard Malanga, Taylor Mead, Andy Warhol, and now Viva, who had not been at the previous sessions. These would become the key figures in the Warhol Factory mural. He began to make dozens of exposures with all of them alternating positions, Warhol always at the end on the right holding a microphone, in keeping with his artistic stance of holding up a mirror to the world. Dick was starting to see results.
Pleased with the central grouping, Avedon then focused on a separate panel that addressed male beauty and sexuality, a core theme of the Factory’s ethos, many of Warhol’s and Paul Morrissey’s films, and one that Dick had not really addressed before with such direct intention. In a fourth session, on October 14, he invited Jay Johnson, Warhol’s boyfriend’s twin brother, and Eric Emerson, Tom Hompertz, and Gerard Malanga to the studio.
Between that session and another one, on October 25, he posed Malanga in various groupings so that he would appear in one section and then another. Then he photographed Emerson, Johnson, and Hompertz as if to echo the grouping of the Three Graces. “Take off your shoes, your shirts,” Johnson recalled Avedon saying, slowly, one step at a time, as if in a game of strip poker. Dick later claimed to be fascinated by their movements and by the graphic quality of their clothes as they fell from their bodies. “Eventually, we were nude,” Johnson said, remembering that Dick asked them to first put the clothing in front of them and then to the side. “The nudity was premeditated, but I wasn’t aware of what was happening. Avedon was impersonal.” In the final portrait, Avedon would use the three of them in the central panel, fully nude, later explaining that without their nudity, “it would not have been about the Warhol Factory in that moment. And one of the coins of that time was . . . beautiful males.”
In yet a further sitting, on October 30, he invited Viva to the studio for dinner. “I’ll send over a limousine to get you,” Viva recalled, describing the way he enticed her, not only for that sitting, but for several others as well. “And I’d say, “‘Well, grab me some caviar and champagne, too.’” Avedon spent time photographing her alone as a possible single panel. Then, later in the evening, Paul Morrissey, Joe Dallesandro, and Candy Darling arrived to be photographed for another panel.
Avedon was interested in presenting Candy Darling nude, a preoperative transsexual at a time when intentional gender reassignment was perceived as degenerate. The Factory was known for its open celebration of gender fluidity. Dick made many portraits of Darling alone in various stages of undress, but he became increasingly frustrated by her preening and posturing. He waited patiently until he was able to capture her in a position that seemed authentic, “a portrait, a beautiful portrait,” he later said, “of this bizarre confusion and thing that Candy Darling had to deal with in her life, what she felt to be her flaw”—her penis.
After poring over hundreds of exposures from the half dozen sessions, shuffling them, so to speak, like playing cards, placing them side by side in multiple combinations, and even considering collaging portions of some frames into other frames, he finally composed the mural with the configuration that now constitutes Andy Warhol and Members of the Factory, New York, October 30, 1969.
The choreography of casual posture, the rhythm of gesture, the empty spaces that lead you into an ambiguity of space, and the multiframe composition evoke the sequential panels of a classical frieze, “as if the figures progressing around the belly of a Greek vase had paused for the photographer’s camera,” wrote Maria Morris Hambourg, the curator of photography at the Metropolitan Museum, in 2002. Her reference to classical antiquity is further suggested by the “satiric charade of the three male (as opposed to female) graces” enacted by the three male nudes in the central panel, and a subtle “play of hands owing much to Renaissance painting.”
The multiple sittings with the members of the Factory transpired over months, in which Avedon photographed them as if he were chiseling a group portrait out of his own intuition, methodically, relying on his interactions with the individual subjects during each session, allowing his eye to lead him to its full realization. He had never done anything like that before—seven sessions, and if you include the mural-sized print, one and a half years to complete. Andy Warhol and Members of the Factory, New York, October 30, 1969 was groundbreaking, “one of the signal achievements of Avedon’s career,” writes Paul Roth, “a work of aesthetic radicalism that perfectly reflected the preoccupations and ambitions of its subject and maker.”