It isn’t about the West. It’s about a photographer who went west to do Avedon portraits.
—RICHARD AVEDON
In the 1980s, Avedon proceeded with his Western project, taking more than a dozen road trips across the vast Western plains, into the majestic Rocky Mountains, the desert, and through cattle country in search of individuals to photograph for his Amon Carter Museum commission. “The beginning of this project coincided with an oil boom in the West,” writes Laura Wilson, who, one day in the middle of June 1980, was in the car with Dick and his two assistants as they headed toward Yukon, Oklahoma. Oil derricks rose in the landscape as they spotted a scruffy figure ambling along the shoulder of Interstate 40 carrying a bedroll on his head. Dick asked his assistant, Jim Varriale, to slow the car down and pull alongside him. Bill Curry was a drifter who claimed never to have stayed in one place for very long, sleeping on the ground wherever he happened to end up at nightfall. “I can hear a blade of grass move,” he told them. “I’m never completely asleep. I always keep a knife.” Dick asked if he could photograph him, invited him into the car, then drove several miles before finding a roadside diner with an exterior wall large enough to tape up a white seamless backdrop.
In one of the pictures Laura Wilson took as documentation of the five-year Western project, Dick stands facing Bill Curry, the drifter, their arms crossed in the same way. “I realized that Dick often stood exactly the same way as his subject,” Laura writes. “He mirrored the person’s posture unconsciously. I think it was one of his ways of connecting.” Dick made a few small adjustments—asking Curry to take off his jacket and tuck in his soiled, short-sleeve sweatshirt—before making a series of exposures. In the final picture, a smudged and unkempt Curry stands just off center in the frame, his would-be handsome features offset by haunted eyes, his arms folded across his slender frame in the same way Dick had mirrored before the shoot. Curry reminded Dick of the son in Long Day’s Journey into Night, who says to his father, “I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death.”
Only a month before, Dick had whisked his friend Harold Brodkey and Brodkey’s soon-to-be wife Ellen off by limousine to Philadelphia to see a major retrospective of work by August Sander at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In the first decades of the twentieth century, Sander made portraits of archetypes of the German people—the farmer, the bricklayer, the banker, the artist—systematically documenting individuals as the population itself was slowly migrating from its agricultural roots in the countryside to urban centers during the years of the Weimar Republic. These Sander portraits are assertively straightforward, descriptive, and precise; the subjects are often presented in a heroic head-to-toe manner, whether sitting or standing. Dick, with Harold and Ellen, spent two hours looking at the 248 portraits in the show. “Sander is one of my greatest influences,” Dick told them.
According to the mythology about August Sander, his magnum opus, the highly ambitious enterprise entitled People of the Twentieth Century, was born a priori of artistic intention and sprung whole as a lifetime project from early adulthood. Yet Sander started out as a photographer with a commercial practice, with commissions from publications, businesses, and private individuals. One of his best-known images, Bricklayer, was actually made while on assignment for a construction company. Not until his forties did Sander look back through his portraits and conceive the idea to codify his subjects by profession or trade. From then on, as the concept took hold, he began the systematic process of targeting and grouping his subjects into typologies. While he is known for the portraits of individuals photographed in the context of their work—the baker with a bowl in his hand standing next to his stove; the blacksmith with his heated iron and forge; the potter with his wheel—some of Sander’s typological subjects, such as composers, architects, and writers, stand against the white solid backdrop of his studio wall, which removed them from the context of their work, abstracting them from daily life. Sound familiar?
Avedon’s photographic enterprise in the American West—in search of people endemic to the labor of the region, whether cowhands, coal miners, oil field workers, or roadside waitresses—must be understood in the context of August Sander. When put into perspective within the entire body of his own portraiture, Avedon, too, systematically photographed the archetypes of American society in the second half of the twentieth century—the writers, the artists, the actors, the politicians, the industrialists, the philanthropists, all from major urban centers—and now he was doing the same with a swath of anonymous individuals, otherwise unaccounted for in history, as he crossed the vast Western landscape.
Dick returned to Texas in September 1980, where he, Laura, and his assistants drove to the oil fields of the Austin Chalk, a geological region in Central Texas. There, more than two hundred drilling rigs were in operation. They went from rig to rig looking for individuals with “the right combination of force and vulnerability,” as Laura Wilson described it. They brought with them copies of the Newsweek issue that featured Avedon on the cover as calling card proof that his request to photograph them was grounded in something of importance. They found Roberto Lopez, a rig worker, resting beside his truck in 103-degree heat after working a forty-eight-hour shift. Laura approached him with the issue of Newsweek to ask if he would agree to be photographed, but he was shy and resistant. A fellow worker overheard their request and offered himself up as a subject for the camera instead. He was bare chested, and from the way he flexed his muscles and contorted his body, he thought of himself as the cock of the walk. Dick figured that by letting him stand in front of the seamless and pose before the camera, it would entice Roberto to join him.
Eventually Roberto agreed to stand in front of the stationary camera with his shirtless amigo, whom Dick slowly and methodically inched out of the frame. Dick didn’t direct Roberto so much as watch him from his usual spot beside the camera, according to Wilson, invoking the kind of patience that Eudora Welty described as “a story-writer’s truth,” as if waiting for the moment in which the subject revealed itself and he was ready, within himself, to see it. In the resulting picture, Roberto, black hair flickering against the white backdrop, oil-stained cheeks, and bare chested under overalls, enters the frame from the left and stares at the viewer with glazed eyes through almond-shaped slits, a kind of apparition at once menacing and eternal. His is “a face,” as Dick would say, “that can hold a wall.”
Dick bought a big Chevy Suburban for the many long trips he, his assistants, and Laura Wilson would take in the next few years, a vehicle large enough to hold all his photographic equipment and comfortable enough inside to endure the seven-hour stretches on the open road between one vast region and another. Sometimes Dick would read aloud to pass the time, from either the short stories of Raymond Carver or The Last Cowboy, a book of literary journalism about a rancher in Texas, by his friend Jane Kramer. Once, as they were driving through Kansas, they stopped at a bookstore and Dick bought a used copy of In Cold Blood, which he read aloud in the back seat. He even insisted that they make a detour to Holcomb to drive down the same road that the killers Dick Hickock and Perry Smith had driven down two decades earlier—and which Dick had walked with Capote while photographing him there for Life—to show them the Clutter family home.
One day in early 1981 Dick was sitting in Laura Wilson’s kitchen in Dallas when her oldest son, a seventh grader, came home from school, excitedly describing a visitor to his class that day—a man wearing a beard of live bees. Several days later, the image appeared to Dick in a dream. He woke up and made a sketch of a man covered with bees. The idea had intrigued him enough to post an advertisement in several beekeeping journals in search of a model willing to pose with bees. The studio received several dozen replies, many with pictures of beekeepers wearing gear such as helmets and veils that obscured their faces. One, though, stood out: Ronald Fischer, a six-foot-three accountant from Chicago and a Sunday beekeeper, who managed a hive of his own bees, was hairless, perhaps the result of alopecia, an autoimmune skin disease, and Dick thought him to be the perfect candidate. After some research, a meeting was set up with an entomologist at the University of California, Davis, which housed multiple bee farms for biological study and agricultural instruction.
In early May 1981, Dick arranged a rendezvous, flying Ronald Fischer out to California from Chicago, Laura Wilson from Dallas, and arriving with his two assistants from New York. They found a location on a farm in Yolo County. White seamless paper was taped against the corrugated steel wall of one of the farm buildings, the camera was set up, and the entomologist arrived with 120,000 bees. Once Fischer was placed shirtless in front of the seamless, the entomologist took a small bottle filled with fluid containing the pheromone scent of a queen bee, and, with a dropper, began dabbing it on one side of Fischer’s face, his neck, his shoulders, and his chest, in keeping with Dick’s drawing of where he wanted the bees to collect. The scent attracted the bees and also prevented them from stinging Fischer—for the most part, anyway. In the first session, the entomologist released one thousand bees, and, as expected, they swarmed onto Fischer’s flesh. The entomologist stood beside him to swat them away from Fischer’s eyes and his lips.
It was an excruciatingly stressful process, a test of Fischer’s trust and a trial of his endurance. “Avedon said to me, ‘Now, listen, you can’t move, because any movement will cause a blur,’” Ronald Fischer remembered. “There were five hundred to eight hundred bees on my chest. I got stung twice. We all got stung.” He stood stone-cold still for the camera, suppressing the natural impulse to swat the bees away as they landed on his skin, or to scratch wherever their movement caused itching. In several tense moments, the entomologist diverted them away from his nostrils as Fischer held his breath for fear of inhaling them. Fischer endured three separate sessions on two separate days as Dick made 121 exposures.
“The Beekeeper,” as the Avedon picture is often referred to, is a balance of opposites. It is skin crawling to see the bees collected on the pate of Fisher’s bald head, the crown of his ear, a swarm on his neck, his shoulders, under his arm, and on both sides of his torso. Fischer resides in celestial calm, but the contrast of so many dark, sharp-winged bees and their razor-thin legs on his tender alabaster skin is flinchworthy. The photograph is so technically precise that every single bee is delineated for our scrutiny, yet it would take a level of patience equivalent to Fischer’s visible self-possession to count beyond fifty without feeling spooked. Fischer’s imperturbable expression and his gesture of tranquility pose a lesson in spiritual transcendence. The portrait is a Zen koan.
“The Beekeeper” is virtuosic proof of Avedon’s photographic acumen, showing the technical ability of the camera to record with a fidelity of description that at times eclipses the capability of the human eye. It is also a daunting creation of religious iconography. “In the end, I made two pictures of Ronald,” Avedon said of two separate exposures. “One was what I called a picture of Christian martyrdom. You feel his suffering from the stings of bees and his expression. He resembles Lazarus coming back from the dead covered with worms. And then the other one, in which he removed himself, is more of a Buddhist image of a man quietly enduring the trials of the world.”
RUEDI HOFMANN, WHO WOULD become Dick’s main assistant, spent a lot of time behind the wheel while traveling with Dick and Laura. “When we were out West, Dick became more relaxed and more personable,” Ruedi said. A natural bond between them had taken hold and for those long stretches of time in the car, they would get stoned and listen to music, sometimes country and western, sometimes opera, Ruedi and Richard Corman, the assistants, up front, Dick and Laura in the back seat, all of them lulled into a kind of silent wonder at the landscape flying by. Once, driving through Montana after a very long day on the road, Dick asked Ruedi to put on a tape of Der Rosenkavalier at full volume. It was sunset and Ruedi was barreling down the open road at ninety miles per hour, and the combination of the speed and the grandeur of the music and the dramatic cloud formations in the wide-open Western sky created a shared mystical moment for all of them. “But then, on the plane back to New York, Dick would find his seat in first class, disengage, and become ‘Richard Avedon’ again,” Ruedi said. “By the time we got to baggage claim, all the protective skin was back in place.”
Soon after the beekeeper shoot in Northern California, Dick was on a plane again to Los Angeles to shoot a ten-page Vogue feature on the young actress Nastassja Kinski, the twenty-year-old daughter of the German actor Klaus Kinski. She had already starred in Tess, directed by Roman Polanski, and was currently filming One from the Heart, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Vogue titled the feature “The Spirit of a New Age” and presented Kinski as a new kind of beauty: “Our yardstick for beauty is not vastly different from what it ever was,” the magazine states: “Blond, even-featured, dimpled Mary Pickford was pretty; blond, even-featured, dimpled Goldie Hawn is pretty; dark, bold-featured, arrogant-looking, sensuous-looking Nastassja Kinski is something more than pretty—a beauty—even though her look is stronger than an audience of sixty years ago might have found acceptable in a romantic leading lady.”
Dick photographed Kinski wearing Agnès B., Perry Ellis, Ralph Lauren, Giorgio di Sant’ Angelo, and Bill Blass. In one picture she is doing a somersault with her legs scissoring out to highlight her bold black-and-blue-checked harem pants; in another, she stands with legs apart in a wide stretch, her hands on her head, wearing a short cashmere cardigan and camel wool knickers. In a third she wears a white shirt and knotted man’s tie—à la Annie Hall—under a long, cashmere sable cardigan. These outfits and her gestures portray the idea of a freethinking iconoclast, which is more than confirmed on the next page: she is lying naked on the floor across the two-page spread entwined with a boa constrictor seemingly a foot thick, longer than the length of her body, with a silvery sheen on its teal-blue and honeycomb-patterned skin, slithering up between her legs, around her waist, across her torso, its head resting on her shoulder and its needle-thin tongue reaching toward her ear. Across the bottom of the picture is ribbon copy that offers a breathy description typical of Vogue: “Charming a snake, Nastassja Kinski, spellbinding in her role in ‘One from the Heart’; she juggled, rode an elephant bareback, made friends with the animal handler, who brought this snake to our sitting. The picture, as you see it, was Nastassja’s idea. The rapport was immediate, intimate. ‘It’s a wonderful feeling, the way it moves, very graceful and sensual,’ she said.”
Before Dick got the shot, Nastassja had spent at least two hours on the cement floor of the studio, naked, everyone in terrified silence as they watched the snake slither on and off her body. The snake handler had to anchor the snake between her feet and wait to see where it would go. At one point, one of the assistants accidentally stepped on it, and everyone panicked. “Don’t worry,” the handler said. “It just ate, so it won’t attack.”
Kinski rolled back and forward to direct the snake’s movement as the trainer indicated a trail for it to follow with his hands, Dick all the while making exposures, waiting patiently for a moment when the handler was out of the frame and the snake’s position was configured to his liking. “I wasn’t afraid,” Nastassja later said. “I love animals.” After what felt like an eternity to the gathered crew, the snake slithered slowly around to her legs and then coursed its way up her torso toward her face. Everyone watched, dumbstruck. “And when it got to her ear, it kissed her with its tongue and Dick got the picture,” Polly Mellen said, in awe even as she recounted it. “I was crying. I couldn’t speak. It was extraordinary, sexual, seductive, special, a rare moment.”
Dick, too, was struck by the convergence of fate and circumstance. “Nastassja rose to the moment; the snake rose to the moment; I rose to the moment,” Dick told Helen Whitney in 1994. “It was one of those absolutely magical things that happen when nothing you planned could equal the random accident of something like that.” The picture was such a success when it appeared in Vogue that the Avedon studio produced the image on a poster, and it sold over two million copies.
The nude portrait of Nastassja Kinski and the snake was made only a month after Ronald Fischer and the bees. Both subjects project unnatural calm in the face of danger, recalling the 1955 picture of Dovima, staving off a stampede of elephants. But while Dovima was staged as a fashion tableau, Nastassja and Ronald were constructed with greater symbolic intention. “The Beekeeper” was the realization of an idea sprung from Dick’s subconscious imagination and created for his artistic enterprise, while Nastassja and the snake was the result of a serendipitous sequence of events in the execution of an editorial fashion spread.
The cross-pollination between Dick’s ongoing commission from the Amon Carter Museum and his position as a Vogue staff photographer presents an interesting conundrum about his work. While Dick made a living working first for Harper’s Bazaar, and later Vogue, as well as from the untold numbers of advertising campaigns for large companies, “he always felt that if he wasn’t also working on a very personal project,” Adam Gopnik told Norma Stevens, “he was letting them win. . . . Anything that put you in a combative relationship with orthodoxy, anything that shocked and scandalized a little bit, he thought was positive.”
The naked Nastassja Kinski and her boa managed to avoid the kind of controversy that erupted from an advertising campaign shot by Dick the previous year. Calvin Klein launched his jeans in 1978, becoming the first high-fashion designer to introduce a denim line. A year later, the company had sold $70 million worth of jeans. His jeans were so tight that some stores in Manhattan installed sofas for customers to lie down on while zipping them up. When asked about his marketing approach, Klein famously said, “Jeans are sex.” He added, “The tighter they are, the better they sell.”
In 1980, Klein, who was directly involved in all aspects of the advertising and marketing of his clothes and fragrances, hired Avedon to shoot the jeans campaign, both the print ads and the television commercials. It was just a matter of finding the right model. Brooke Shields was not Calvin’s first choice, but at Dick’s suggestion, he met with her and her mother, who managed her modeling career, and found the young woman delightful and extremely beautiful. Shields had already received critical acclaim for her role as a child prostitute in the film Pretty Baby by Louis Malle. “I was fifteen and already an old hand modeling,” she said, explaining that, at five feet nine inches by the time she was thirteen, she had been modeling adult clothes for years. “I first met Dick when I was eleven and had already worked with him so many times and done so many Vogue covers with Polly Mellen.”
“Doon Arbus was a very important part of the process,” Klein said, describing her role in writing the taglines for each of the commercials. “It was the first time I had worked with Dick. Dick and Doon were very close, and each time Doon had written a new line Dick would call me up and want me to hear it. I was at his studio every night. They would act out the line. Often it was hilarious. We just had a lot of fun. And then we’d have vodka and it became a party, every night.”
The commercials straddled a fine line between pure innocence and erotic provocation, and Brooke, at fifteen, had exactly the right combination of each—she was dewy and winsome but also sensual, her long brown hair adding a mysterious, if not salacious, dimension to her appeal. In a half dozen TV spots, Brooke appears in expensive blouses and skintight Calvin Klein jeans, against a blank seamless background, most often sitting or lying down, and offering clever Doon Arbus–isms—curt, paradoxical, and suggestive. In one, Brooke is reclining while reading aloud from a nineteenth-century romantic novel, the camera traveling slowly up her leg. When it reaches the book in her hands, she puts it down, stares into the camera, and says: “Reading is to the mind what Calvins are to the body.” In another, she is on her back, her legs in the air as she counts out loud. Then she looks at the camera and says, “Whenever I get some money I buy Calvins, and if there’s any left, I pay the rent.” But, in the ad that caused the controversy, the camera slowly pans from Brooke’s expensive boots and up her Calvin Klein jeans–clad leg as she whistles “Clementine”; the camera then pans back to reveal Brooke sitting on one leg, her other leg akimbo, brushing her hair aside, and speaking directly to the viewer: “You want to know what comes between me and my Calvins?” she asks. “Nothing.”
The implication was that Shields, fifteen years old, was not wearing underwear, and it got the prompt attention of the censors. ABC and CBS banned the ad from their television networks. “I did not anticipate the controversy at all,” Klein said, relishing its silver lining. “It got the attention of the media and the press, and that turned out to be very good for sales.”
In the case of Calvin Klein, the Avedon studio was functioning like a full-service advertising agency—not only shooting the spots but coming up with the idea for the campaign. The commercials were shot in a studio in Astoria, Queens, that had the necessary movie equipment. Klein was there for every shoot, and Dick worked directly with the cinematographer, always with Doon and his assistants close at hand. “Everything had already been thoroughly planned out by the time I got to the set,” Brooke remembered, “so he didn’t waste any time for the actual shoot.”
For each thirty-second spot, they did multiple takes, sometimes as many as ten in a row. “I was such a perfectionist myself that I was a good soldier, and of course I wanted his approval,” she said, adding that she and Dick communicated well, but once the shooting began, he went into an unreachable zone. And while he always proceeded with certitude, Brooke observed a certain insecurity about him, too. She thought his need for perfection was so strong that he feared dropping into a deep abyss of failure if he did not reach it. “He had a darker side,” she said, “that dark, sad side of him.”
Another ad campaign generated by the Avedon studio during that period was known as “The Diors.” It had all the properties of an episodic drama in which each new ad was a sly caper in a series about a very soigné ménage à trois—André Gregory as “the Wizard”; Kelly LeBrock as “the Mouth”; and Vincent Vallarino as “Oliver.” Over the course of the three-year campaign, the Diors—full of fanciful mischief and elegant hijinks—cavorted in chic private rooms and grand public verandas straight out of a Noël Coward play. The ads were ubiquitous in national magazines, and in New York, on billboards and across the sides of buses. “One of the most talked-about campaigns of the last year has to be the Christian Dior print advertising,” the Times wrote. “Christian Dior has been dead since 1957, and this advertising is intended to make the news he can no longer make himself.” According to the article, credit was due largely to “the same man who is responsible for one of the other much-talked-about campaigns, the television commercial for Calvin Klein jeans—Richard Avedon . . . aided and abetted by Doon Arbus, a copywriter.”
“There’s no downside to my commercial photography,” Dick said in a 1995 American Masters documentary about him. “It’s fun, the food is good, the thing is silly. The respect that I have for the hairdressers, the art directors, the account executives and what they live through with their clients who don’t get what they’re trying to do. . . . It’s like a little circus of intention, of hard, difficult, crafted work to sell—this is a capitalist country—to sell the products that are made that people seem to want.”
In the kind of white-tiled bathroom that graced a suite on the grand ocean liners of the 1930s, Oliver “Dior” sits naked in a large tub with the captain’s cap on his head, a cigar in his mouth, smiling at the Mouth, dressed in a floor-length black skirt and white satin coat and holding a glass of champagne while the Wizard, standing beside her in a tux, wags a finger at Oliver. “When they were good they were very, very good,” goes the copy, “and when they were bad they were gorgeous.” In another elegant tableau, the Mouth, in a black velvet pantsuit with plummeting décolletage, strikes a posture of boredom as the Wizard holds open a picture book called Lulu in Hollywood; Oliver leans over the book while staring at the Mouth. The copy: “They loved armadillos, the American flag, and they disliked all their friends equally.” The ads were meant to project an air of naughtiness that was acceptable because they were so very Continental.
AT THE BEGINNING OF the Reagan era, as Dick was intermittently photographing out West and juggling features for Vogue and ads for Calvin Klein, Dior, and, now, also, Versace, an exhibit of sobering poetic resonance opened at the Museum of Modern Art in October 1981: The Work of Atget: Old France, the first of four exhibitions mounted by the museum on Eugène Atget’s oeuvre. The exhibit elevated a heretofore unknown figure to the stature of a deity among artists. In attitude, rigor, and scope, as well as in the purity of its emotional ambience, the body of Atget’s photographs of Paris and environs over thirty years is a comprehensive documentation of the streets, buildings, village squares, monuments, chateaux, their gardens and statuary, all with unadorned description, precision of detail, and arresting subtlety of mood and atmosphere, composing a portrait of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century France.
The Atget exhibition was a benchmark moment for photography as its ascension in the art world was gaining momentum. For Avedon, his own work on Lartigue and the publication of Diary of a Century had given him insights into the French sensibility in the medium of photography, too, and while the significance of Atget was unquestionable, the show necessarily sidelined Lartigue as a lesser figure and consequently echoed Dick’s own stature in the hierarchy of Szarkowski’s canon building.
“Atget represented to John the very best of photography for many reasons, not least of which is that Atget seemingly saw a purpose for his work that had nothing to do with creating art, but rather, a moral purpose,” said Susan Kismaric, who worked with Szarkowski as a curator in the photography department at MoMA. No better testimony to this conclusion exists than in the poetic description put forward by Szarkowski in his introduction to the Atget exhibition catalog:
As a way of beginning, one might compare the art of photography to the act of pointing. All of us, even the best-mannered of us, occasionally point, and it must be true that some of us point to more interesting facts, events, circumstances, and configurations than others.
Here Szarkowski revealed something of the foundation of his own thinking about the nature of photography, no matter who is making the photographs. In this next passage, speaking specifically of Atget, he says:
The talented practitioner of the new discipline would perform with a special grace, sense of timing, narrative sweep, and wit, thus endowing the act not merely with intelligence, but with that quality of formal rigor that identifies a work of art, so that we would be uncertain, when remembering the adventure of the tour, how much our pleasure and sense of enlargement had come from the things pointed to and how much from a pattern created by the pointer.
Despite the lucidity of Avedon’s comprehensive achievement and the formal rigor of his work, Szarkowski refused to acknowledge what he was “pointing to” because his artistic imperatives were obscured by the glitz of his commercial prominence. The glamour of Avedon’s name and the gloss of his notoriety made it impossible for the Szarkowskis of the world to trust the sincerity of his intentions.
“Among young, so-called serious photographers, Richard Avedon didn’t play a part,” remembered the photographer Joel Meyerowitz, who spoke as a later convert and a friend. “In my circle of friends—Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, a handful of others—Avedon’s work didn’t have much influence. We were looking at Robert Frank, Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans . . . Avedon was in commerce, not art.” While this attitude tormented Dick, it motivated him, too: “Alongside MoMA’s trajectory of the history of photography from Eugene Atget to Walker Evans to Robert Frank and Diane Arbus, Avedon invented a parallel universe: Lartigue, Brodovitch, and Avedon,” writes Robert Rubin in Avedon’s France. There is no doubt that Brodovitch was every bit the arbiter of photography in the twentieth century as Szarkowski, and certainly, Dick had Brodovitch in his camp to prove that he was the real thing.
The final slap in the face from Szarkowski, though, was the Irving Penn retrospective he mounted at the Museum of Modern Art, which opened on September 13, 1984. This was the show Dick had envisioned for himself after years of discussion with Szarkowski a decade earlier. The exhibition was a survey of Penn’s long career and featured his work in portraiture, fashion, and advertising, as well as his nude studies, his ethnographic subjects, and his still lifes. “Unlike the elaborate orchestration of earlier fashion pictures—by de Meyer, Beaton, and others—in which the dress and its model appear to act out a role, Penn’s 1950 pictures ignore plots and dream worlds,” states the MoMA press release. “They are not stories, but simply pictures,” writes Mr. Szarkowski—as if “stories” were somehow a superfluous distraction in photographic imagery. With this statement about the absence of “stories” in Penn’s work, Szarkowski might have intended to distinguish Penn from his fashion world peers—in particular, Avedon—whose constructed scenes were, in the curator’s calculation, artificial, commercial, and pretentious. According to the Szarkowski doctrine, documentation was the backbone of photography: authenticity was of paramount relevance. In his fashion photography, Penn did not “construct” scenes with the look and feel of real life; there was never any doubt that his images were made in the studio. Szarkowski would never embrace the “look” of an authentic moment in a photograph—as opposed to the actual moment—as a valid use of the medium by an artist. As Avedon created—invented—metaphors, Szarkowski saw Avedon’s invented stories as untruths, dismissing the work as void in moral terms, and, by association, dismissing Avedon’s portraiture, too.
Of course, for every Picasso there is a Braque, for every Pollock, a de Kooning. Avedon and Penn were rivals who vied for pages, position, and subject matter. They even made portraits of the same people at different times. While the two of them kept upping the ante in terms of imagination, style, and technique, each one succeeded in establishing a distinct visual signature. In portraiture, Avedon distilled the picture frame to nothing but his subject against a white backdrop—wrinkles, bad teeth, and all. Penn may not have made himself a student of his subjects, but their stature is what he always seemed to render with a preternatural eye to history—theirs, and perhaps his own. Yet, the similarities between Avedon and Penn are uncanny. Both were born in or near New York seven years apart; both were Jewish; both studied with Brodovitch; both married twice; both had one son. One worked at the Bazaar and the other at Vogue before both ended up at Vogue. They were colleagues and competitors who respected each other and found themselves together, alone, at the top of their profession. “Those guys! Those poor guys,” said Peter Galassi, who succeeded Szarkowski as chief curator of photography at MoMA. “They were just fated to end up in the same sentence all the time. What a horrible burden for both of them. Each of them deserves his own sentence.”
DICK, NOW SIXTY-ONE YEARS old, continued to be in constant motion, pulled in too many directions in an unrelenting barrage of professional commitments—which was how he always liked it. Yet it was beginning to take a toll on his stamina and his psyche. He was resorting to amphetamines and sleeping pills, a dangerous combination that wreaked some havoc on his demeanor, creating at times uncharacteristic sloppy behavior that was more erratic and revealing than he intended. One night soon after he and his crew had returned from a trip out West, Ruedi Hofmann and several other studio hands went to dinner at a neighborhood restaurant. They didn’t expect Dick to walk in, nor did they imagine that he would patently ignore the professional family with whom he worked every single day. They were stunned when he walked right past their table. It may have been a result of the pill taking, but, just as easily, it could have been his cruel habit of reminding them about the invisible boundaries of the hierarchic divide. But sometimes, too, his generosity knew no bounds. Alicia Grant Longwell, his archivist, was going on maternity leave. On her last day she arrived at the studio at noon. It was not until 1981 that the surgeon general issued an advisory for pregnant women to avoid alcohol, so it was natural that Dick thought nothing of waiting for her at the front door with a shot of vodka. Inside, the table had been set up for a proper luncheon, with linens and a large bouquet of flowers. Everyone in the studio took a seat and the feast began. Dick had obtained from her mother a picture of Alicia as a toddler, in her birthday suit, and he’d had it blown up and put on the wall. After lunch, a multitiered cake was brought out and Hiro’s Japanese assistant popped out of it wearing a G-string. Then, prepped in advance with a rehearsal by none other than Dick’s close friend Twyla Tharp, Dick and Norma did a Fred-and-Ginger tap dance to “Isn’t This a Lovely Day?” from Top Hat.
When Ruedi Hofmann, Dick’s main assistant for four years, left to start a studio of his own, Dick had a party for him at Primavera, an excellent Italian restaurant in the neighborhood. As Hofmann recalls, “He got the room downstairs and Norma and about twenty people from the studio came. He flew my parents up from South Carolina and they surprised me by popping out of a big box in the center of the room.” The elaborate going-away parties were a ceremonial way for Dick to acknowledge his appreciation for the rigorous hard work of his employees, and, equally, a grand geste with which his genuine affection for these employees in particular could be safely contained and packaged.
With Marvin Israel, however, it would be a sadder and more painful departure. Dick had known Marvin for nearly thirty years. They had done some of their very best work together. On more than a few occasions, Dick spoke of Marvin as part of the psychological core of his professional family: in the hierarchy of an almost familial trust he placed in his talent and judgment, after Brodovitch, the father figure, “Marvin,” he acknowledged, “was a brother.” Certainly, they had had their sibling-like differences, their cold wars. Norma Stevens was by no means fond of Marvin, calling him “impossible, feisty, angry—really angry, all the time.” On the other hand, she acknowledged he was “smart and gifted and full of value.”
Dick brought Marvin in, once again, to design the book for In the American West, and also the exhibition at the Amon Carter Museum. Marvin made a rough maquette of the gallery spaces, just as he had done with the Marlborough show a decade before, and in early May 1984, over a year before the show was scheduled to open, the two of them flew down to Fort Worth to take more accurate measurements of the galleries, and to get a clearer sense of how the pictures would interact with the space. Marvin loved horses, keeping his own horse in a stable in Central Park, and when they got to Texas, he asked Laura Wilson, who lived in the Dallas–Fort Worth area, where he might go riding. She said that Dick was expecting him at the museum. “I don’t care,” Marvin told her. He had his own priorities.
Marvin managed to work on the show one day and ride the next, until he complained of severe chest pains. Laura and her husband rushed him to the hospital, where he was told he had had a heart attack and had to submit to urgent tests. Doon Arbus flew down from New York. She and Marvin watched the Kentucky Derby on television in his hospital room. Laura, with whom Dick and Doon were both staying, brought an Audubon print to put on the wall of Marvin’s room to cheer him up. In less than a week, Marvin was dead. He was sixty-one years old. At the crack of dawn on May 8, 1984, Dick called Norma in New York. She heard only an audible sigh on the other end of the phone and thought it was a crank call. Before she could hang up, finally Dick said, “Marvin died. I can’t speak.”
FROM 1979 TO 1984, Avedon traveled through 13 states and 189 towns, from Texas to Idaho, conducting 752 sittings and exposing 17,000 sheets of film through his eight-by-ten-inch Deardorff view camera. Ruedi Hofmann and David Liittschwager began working for almost two years to print the 123 selected portraits for the ensuing exhibition and catalog. Hofmann made an entire set of sixteen-by-twenty-inch prints that Dick rejected as too dark and too full of contrast. It was hard for Ruedi and David to follow Dick’s directions for reprinting the series when, according to Laura Wilson, he would say “Make the person more gentle” or “Give the face more tension.” The final 16 × 20 prints became the template for the larger 56¼ × 45 exhibition prints, which had to be made in a rented studio with a customized horizontal enlarger on a track with wheels, the large sheets of photographic paper placed against a metal wall with magnets to hold them in place during exposure. They had to purchase a dryer large enough to accommodate the size of the prints. A single print could be the result of five days of toil. Avedon gave a complete set of the exhibition-size prints to the Amon Carter Museum to fulfill the terms of the commission, valued at the time over $1.5 million. The return on the initial investment of $500,000—$100,000 per year for five years—was not only the 123 photographs that have appreciated in value exponentially since they were made in 1985, but, equally, a body of work well beyond measure in the history of photography.
The exhibition, In the American West, opened at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, on September 14, 1985. “Despite competition with a Bruce Springsteen concert and the Lone Star Chili Competition, public interest reached near-fever pitch,” wrote Suzanne Muchnic in a feature about the show in the Los Angeles Times. It attracted five thousand viewers the first weekend and three thousand on consecutive weekends.
The Amon Carter Museum, designed by Philip Johnson in 1961, is an International Style building with a two-level glass facade behind several arched porticos of white Texas shell stone across the front. “Never before had so many photographic prints of such scale and quality been seen in the museum,” wrote Laura Wilson. Ten larger-than-life portraits—78⅛ × 64½ inches—were installed on walls that faced the exterior front of the museum, visible through the glass facade outside on the plaza.
“In focusing on the West’s unsung laborers—as well as the disinherited, the freaks, the jailbirds and the nut cases—[Avedon] has touched a chord of familiarity that most observers don’t want to remember but can’t stop looking at,” Muchnic wrote. “The grizzled, wizened, dirt-caked adults, the freckled, pock-mocked adolescents and the tousled children are all too believable.”
In the American West, the exhibition catalog published by Harry Abrams, is a meticulously printed book, eleven by fourteen inches in size, simply designed as if it were a portfolio of photographs for easy viewing, one picture per page, each one with signature film holder borders. The simple titles provide the names of the subjects and their lines of work or existential identities: factory worker, coal miner, housekeeper, day laborer, drifter, nine-year-old. In the foreword, Avedon writes:
I use an 8 × 10 camera on a tripod, not unlike the camera used by Curtis, Brady, or Sander, except for the speed of the shutter and the film. I stand next to the camera, not behind it, several inches to the left of the lens and about four feet from the subject. As I work I must imagine the pictures I am taking because since I do not look through the lens, I never see precisely what the film records until the print is made. I am close enough to touch the subject and there is nothing between us except what happens as we observe one another during the making of the portrait.
Over the course of two years, the show traveled from the Amon Carter Museum to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, and Atlanta’s High Museum of Art. In some quarters the work was met with outrage. Avedon was accused of privileged voyeurism and the exploitation of his unwitting subjects. With Avedon, “style has always been understood as political expression, and the will to style but a reflection of the will to power,” writes Max Kozloff, the art historian, indicting Avedon’s overdetermined use of the eight-by-ten camera for its optical potency.
If Dick was hoping to sway John Szarkowski with this body of work, he was likely, once again, disappointed: “Avedon’s West is not the West as I know it,” Szarkowski said, dismissively. Others, though, eventually acknowledged Avedon’s work as a formidable achievement. Maria Morris Hambourg, who, in 2002, as the curator in charge of the photography department at the Metropolitan Museum, would organize Avedon’s definitive portrait show there, which included portraits from In the American West, concluded about the totality of his work: “Laureate of the invisible reflected in physiognomy, Avedon has become our poet of portraiture.”
While some of his subjects in the West series—or their families—were distressed by the way they looked in their pictures, equally there were those who were thrilled to see their own portraits so large on a museum wall. Although some members of the public raved about the exhibit, “more often than not they would emerge from the gallery awed but disturbed by it,” reported the Chicago Tribune. One viewer, a law professor at Loyola University in New Orleans, was thoughtful in his comments after seeing the show. “The guy, he’s good. It’s depressing but graphic,” Bill Crowe said. “It’s a fine line between desperation and hard living. . . . I don’t know what his purpose is. . . . Maybe he’s the Thomas Wolfe of photographers, a manic depressive of sorts.”
Avedon insisted that “it is a fictional West” he was presenting, no different or more conclusive than the mythologies put forward in the name of American history, such as in the Westerns that featured John Wayne, in which the cowboys were rendered as the good guys, or in the portraits by Edward S. Curtis of a Native American population that had suffered the trauma and indignity of having their lands seized and their way of living destroyed.
When interviewed about this body of work by Michel Guerrin for Le Monde in the early 1990s, Avedon was asked if he thought he had stolen something from his subjects. “Stealing their souls?” he countered. “Stealing implies a crime. No harm is done here. I’ve just recorded their faces in the way that I see them. I give it my soul, and they give it their surface,” he said, referring to the way a face appears on the two-dimensional plane of the photographic print. Guerrin asked him how he reconciled the fact that he sold the images for $14,000 each, which is more than his subjects made in ten years. “The sitter doesn’t make the photograph,” he replied, with a degree of insensitivity that served the argument so many people made at the time about the coldness of his pictures and their absence of humanity. “The sitter for these pictures is no more than the model. If they agree to be photographed in exchange for a print—which has value—in exchange for their being in a book, in a museum show, and being invited to see it, that’s why they do it. So, why should I share? You know . . . would Cézanne pay the apples?” It was just this kind of statement that made people question the sincerity of his intent.
When a Times reporter asked Dick if he manipulated the subjects in his series on the West, he asked if he could submit a written answer. “It’s trivializing to make someone look ‘sage,’ ‘noble,’ or even conventionally beautiful, when the real thing is so much crazier, contradictory and therefore fascinating,” he wrote, making the case that the kind of candor he was after required a certain amount of contrivance. “It’s in trying to direct traffic between Artifice and Candor, without being run over, that I’m confronted with in the questions about photography that matter most to me. . . . Do photographic portraits have different responsibilities to the sitter than portraits in paint or prose, and if they seem to, is this a fact or a misunderstanding about the nature of photography?”
Dick made a simpler and more honest point to the Washington Post. “This is about class,” he said, referring to a population that resided in the shadows of cultural awareness. “It’s about very hard times, very long hours, hard work, unrewarding lives with very little expectation of upward mobility.” Aram Saroyan wrote that Avedon’s pictures in the American West reversed the circuitry of his celebrity portraits, “taking subjects from the social and economic underside of Reagan-era America,” and bestowing his fame on them by rendering each in the now iconographic white-backdrop, black-and-white template of the Avedon portrait.
“While stopping shy of Surrealism, Avedon’s portraits of people west of the Mississippi seem more idiosyncratic than documentary—which, it turns out, is to the credit of the pictures,” Andy Grundberg, then photography critic of the New York Times, wrote. “In the West Avedon seems to have found a subject equal to his ambitions.”
The discussion about whether the wealthy and famous Avedon had exploited his subjects versus the sincerity of his artistic intent transpired in the press, as well as in art chat among the cognoscenti. Regardless, it is irrefutable that by then Richard Avedon had created a serious opus.
His entire body of portraiture included individuals of great celebrity and accomplishment as well as anonymous individuals with no distinction other than the daily toil of survival. Except for slight variations over the years, he photographed almost all his subjects in the same way, and the consistency of format and originality of vision provides a unique view of the human being: We are all of us individuals of a species whose nature is determined by its structure—we have two eyes, a nose, a mouth; hair that varies in texture and color; skin that changes tone with age; bodies of varying shape; gestures that suggest mood and attitude. The single, persistent gaze of Avedon’s camera across the swaths of humanity provides a stunning document of our sameness as it scrutinizes to forensic exactitude the distinctions that make each of us unique. It’s a formidable observation of who we are as a species, for better or worse, and also a subjective one, which makes it that much more arresting, and unsettling.
“They stand like bent ramrods, twisted pokers and charred fence posts. Ravaged by time and molded by hard labor or unfortunate circumstance, these miners, cowboys, carnies, waitresses, rattlesnake skinners and drifters have submitted to the will of one of America’s most celebrated photographers,” Suzanne Muchnic wrote, and then she quoted Avedon about the project: “I discovered that we have in common everything that matters: wanting our children to have betters lives than we have, worrying about our aging parents, trying to make the most of ourselves,” he said. “If I have one goal for these photographs it’s that people will pay attention to them and say, ‘That could be me.’”