In photography, as everywhere, there are those who know how to see and others who don’t even know to look; there are those with taste, and there are boors, men of conscience who are merchants nonetheless, as in every trade.
—NADAR
In the summer of 1992, Tina Brown was appointed editor of the New Yorker, news that sent tremors through the collective conscience of American journalism. The New Yorker, a discreet yet resonant voice in the media cacophony, represented a standard of cultural excellence and a touchstone of ethical judgment across the arc of the twentieth century. By contrast, in the 1980s, Tina Brown—British, brassy, and culturally carnivorous—had turned Vanity Fair into essential reading for the moneyed classes of the Reagan era, delivering savory “dish” about misbehaving socialites, spy-novel intrigue inside family dynasties, and scandalous malfeasance in the most respectable executive suites, all in a monthly aphrodisiac composed of snappy patter on glossy pages with splashy—and sometimes naughty—photographs. The New York intelligentsia feared that Ms. Brown, with her predilection for “just deserts,” would scramble the impenetrable calculus of moral probity that was the New Yorker and, well, cheapen it.
Together, Si Newhouse, who owned Condé Nast, the parent company of both the New Yorker and Vanity Fair, and Ms. Brown asserted “emphatically that she would not bring to the New Yorker the kind of glitz she used so successfully in Vanity Fair,” reported the Times. “Her most famous cover was a nude picture of the actress Demi Moore, who was seven months pregnant at the time.” The article described a meeting between Ms. Brown and editors at the New Yorker, who were assured that “she would not be adding photos or changing the magazine in the ways we had feared.”
Yet before the year was out and despite Ms. Brown’s promise, an only slightly less shocking tremor rippled through the same journalistic circles when the Times reported the appointment of Richard Avedon as the first staff photographer of the estimable magazine—proof to die-hard believers that the magazine’s DNA was, indeed, being altered. “I’ve photographed just about everyone in the world,” Avedon said, addressing the challenge of his new role. “But what I hope to do is photograph people of accomplishment, not celebrity, and help define the difference once again.”
David Remnick, then a staff writer at the magazine, recalled Brown’s “full court press” to hire Avedon: “The plan was to use him to establish photography in the magazine as a form,” he said. “It would be as if you were introducing poetry by having only W. H. Auden.” Asked many years later to reflect on how she arrived at the decision to hire Avedon, Brown was circumspect. “I thought there was one photographer only whose work could leap out of the pristine walls of Caslon typeface and that was Dick Avedon,” she said. “So clean, powerful and dramatic. Plus, his own archive would mean we could use his images for historical pieces about authors, artists, dancers, political figures. And it turned out even better than I hoped. Wherever we had a subject it seemed Dick had taken a picture or was willing to take one.”
Although the magazine had survived for more than fifty years with nary a photograph, it was not long before the Brown regime won over its readership. Not only did she infuse the stale and airless editorial thinking at the magazine with some badly needed oxygen, she instilled a sense of cultural urgency that sharpened the stories and the profiles without quite abandoning the magazine’s underlying gravitas. Avedon’s portraits, too, breathed new life on the page. “His photographs, in their epigrammatic compression of a whole subject into a single black-and-white image, were New Yorker profiles in miniature,” Adam Gopnik said.
Dick spent a lifetime working for magazines, bringing to his role of photographer an editorial voice as much as a visual signature. So many of his early fashion photographs in Harper’s Bazaar were narrative entities in a single image that evolved from his own literary imagination and with which he provided editorial solutions to what had always been considered visual problems. He had been an editor of his high school literary magazine; an editor at Theatre Arts; a photographer at Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue; an editorial coconspirator at Egoïste; and now, as the sole photographer at the New Yorker, he fit seamlessly into the role of a “contributor” who generated singular editorial “content” beyond the simple illustration of other writers’ stories. “He required somebody to bounce ideas off of,” said Pam Maffei McCarthy, the deputy editor of the New Yorker. “He would call me at exactly one minute past nine every morning. It was always an exhausting call—his level of energy was superhuman. He would usually want to talk about whatever piece of theater he’d seen the night before, and his ideas for the critics’ section. He supplied so many of them he was like an unofficial editor of the theater pages.”
One of his earliest subjects for the New Yorker was Breyten Breytenbach, the South African poet, for a profile entitled “An Afrikaner Dante,” by Lawrence Weschler. Breytenbach had been imprisoned in South Africa for seven years, from 1975 to 1982, for the alleged crime of treason. As a young artist and poet in Paris, he married a Vietnamese immigrant. As his poetry gained recognition in his native country, he received a literary award in South Africa that he wanted to accept in person. He applied for a travel visa for himself and his wife, only to have it denied, as South Africa considered his marriage to an Asian woman illegitimate. Swept into the social currents of the 1960s, Breytenbach became increasingly active in political causes in Paris as his writings became more incendiary toward the apartheid policies of South Africa, and when he set foot on South African soil again in 1975, he was arrested and jailed. It took seven years of internal pressure and international protests to get him released from prison, and in 1983, he made his first painting as a free man, a self-portrait in which he stands with his eyes closed and his hands at his waist, palms up, one above the other. In the 1993 Avedon portrait, Breytenbach strikes the same hand gesture. In this portrait, Weschler believes Dick to have been had. “When I say that this is the one time I saw the subject defeat Dick, compare Breyten’s self-presentation in the portrait with Breyten’s first self-portrait after prison, an image Dick had not seen (I am almost positive) when he took the photo, which is to say that Breyten was completely in command of his (self-ironizing) hagiographic self-presentation.”
Perhaps Breytenbach did assume more control over his image than was usual for an Avedon, but it does not negate the potency of this epigrammatic portrait: Breytenbach’s attitude in the picture is one of indifference, his expression filled with resignation, his hand gesture in the form of a Buddhist Dhyana Mudra, mystical and imbued with possibility.
In another portrait, this time under the rubric “Showcase by Richard Avedon,” Fiona Shaw, the Irish actress, sits topless, her hands to her chest holding the fabric of her shirt just over her breasts, her expression of wild amusement at the border of raucous madness. In this portrait the solid background is not white but gray, which sets the white pants she is wearing in relief, unbuttoned and turned down at the waist. “She’s like Joan of Arc, only the flame’s inside,” Avedon is quoted as saying upon first meeting her. This “Showcase” is an example of a shift of importance between words and images in any magazine, and, as well, representative of Avedon’s authority over the use of his photographs. While John Lahr, the magazine’s theater critic, wrote the column accompanying the photograph, listing Shaw’s recent appearances in a variety of very high-minded productions of Electra; Hedda Gabler; Richard II, in which she played the king; and “The Waste Land,” by T. S. Eliot, he gives a portion of the column over to a description of the way Avedon photographed her, in which she is cast “in the improbable role of glamour puss,” yet “her sense of fun and irony shine through.”
In 1995, Dick photographed Ralph Fiennes, then thirty-two years old, on the eve of his Broadway stage appearance as Hamlet. He had made his name on the screen in Schindler’s List, for which he was nominated for an Oscar. “A sizable slice of the audience, I suspect, will be made of moviegoers tempted away from the multiplex and into the spit-and-cough of live performance by the prospect of observing an idol in the flesh,” Anthony Lane writes in his profile. In Avedon’s portrait, there is a demonic edge to Fiennes’s haunted expression, his deeply handsome features framed by his dark, shoulder-length hair and imbued with an intense combination of curiosity, vulnerability, and manic turmoil. His shirt is ripped; his hands are lifted to his chest self-defensively. The portrait is striking in the simplicity with which Fiennes appears in a performative gesture filled with emotion instead of technique.
During Avedon’s tenure at the magazine, which would last until his death in 2004, any one of his many photographs of the cultural figures of fin de siècle America serve to exemplify his unique editorial contribution to the magazine. “I recognize that most portraiture is ennobling in one sense or another, and maybe mine is too, if the definition of nobility includes a struggle with ambivalence,” Avedon told Michel Guerrin of Le Monde. “To put it simply, a photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he’s being photographed, and what he does with that knowledge is as much a part of the picture as what he’s wearing or how he looks. He’s implicated in what’s happening, and he has a certain real power over the result.”
Lisette Model told Dick that she considered his photographs of his father, for example, to be “performances.” He agreed. “We all perform,” he said. “It’s what we do for each other all the time, deliberately or unintentionally. It’s a way of telling about ourselves in the hope of being recognized as what we’d like to be. I trust performances. 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 photographer’s response to that is what the making of a portrait is about.”
Dick seemed less interested in rendering the individual than he was in capturing the moment of interaction between him and the subject. That is why he often claimed his portraits to be self-portraits. Perhaps that is why he so loved the theater, in which moments transpire between the actors onstage and the audience that are alive and palpable—and why he would go repeatedly to the same play, because that interaction is different with each performance, just as a portrait of any of his subjects would be different at each sitting.
IN 1993, DURING HIS seventieth year, Avedon signed a ten-book deal with Random House in partnership with Eastman Kodak Professional Imaging, described by the publishing house as the “co-publisher” on these projects, for a purported $10 million. “Avedon says the Kodak grant is ‘not anywhere near that amount,’” reported Kay Larson in the Washington Post, “but a Kodak executive who requested anonymity says that $10 million is ‘the figure heard all over Kodak.’” A ten-book contract was unprecedented for any writer, much less a photographer, in particular one who by all measures was at an age when most people were slowing down and thinking about summing up. Yet at seventy, Dick retained the energy and expectation of a man easily twenty years his junior, juggling his position as the sole photographer for the New Yorker, producing books for Random House, and fulfilling his ongoing, wildly lucrative contract with Gianni Versace and other fashion labels to shoot their ad campaigns.
Raymond DeMoulin, a vice president in charge of professional photography at Kodak, had vast resources to throw at promotional projects, and it was his idea to cultivate two photographers of solid reputation on which to shower his corporate beneficence: one was Sebastião Salgado, who was invited into the Magnum membership for his searing documentation of the world’s laborers, and the other was Richard Avedon. “Saint Ray,” as DeMoulin was called in the loftier precincts of discreet curatorial fundraising, gave Avedon a career boost worthy of a major artist. The $10 million “grant” would cover an exhibition at the Whitney, plus the ten books to be published by Random House. The arrangement served Eastman Kodak in equal measure, as their imprimatur would appear on all the books that Avedon published—one brand name in service of another.
An Autobiography was the first Avedon book to be published under this contract. It was something of a summing up, with 284 photographs taken over the course of his career, many of them portraits, as well as his early fashion work and his attempts at reportage. “It was the first book that brought all of his work together,” said Mary Shanahan, who designed An Autobiography, although she was quick to point out that Betti Paul Avedon, Dick’s ex-daughter-in-law, had begun the initial selection of pictures in the late 1980s and put in place the basic structure, until Betti and John were divorced and her involvement with the project ended.
“This book tracks the path of three crucial illusions in my life,” Avedon writes in his two-page introduction. “The first section is about the illusion of laughter, and a young man’s discovery of the fine line between hilarity and panic. The second section is about the illusion of power. The third is about the loss of all illusions.” He explains that the pictures of his family—his mother, father, and sister; his wife and son and grandsons—are “all about the dream of building a happy family amid the denial of past unhappiness.” He describes other portraits of individuals either “running from unhappiness or hiding in power . . . locked within the reputations, ambitions, beliefs, even within the forms of their own earlier happiness.” The contradiction between the reality of Dick’s experience as he describes it—the perpetual flight from unhappiness—and the presentation of power in the form of, say, public glory is a theme that permeates this autobiography, although the picture choices and the layouts by no means represent a clear-cut depiction of this dichotomy.
“It was a deliberate choice to make unexpected connections between pictures,” Shanahan said. One self-portrait—taken in 1964 in a photo booth in which Dick covered half his face with a cutout mask of James Baldwin’s face—is paired with Stephanie Seymour, his favorite model in the 1990s, who stands up straight in a formfitting black sheath so sheer that her breasts are visible, lifting the hem above her waist, exposing her naked crotch, her pubic hair trimmed for the occasion. While each of these images is strong in its own right, bifurcation might be the visual factor that unites them. Dick is half black, half white in his self-portrait with the James Baldwin mask; Stephanie is the epitome of elegant restraint above the waist, intentionally shocking and exhibitionist below.
While the date of Avedon’s seventieth birthday was May 15, 1993, the publication of An Autobiography was the occasion for an official black-tie dinner celebration thrown in Dick’s honor by Random House and the New Yorker at the New York Public Library on September 27. Aside from the husband-and-wife hosts—Harry Evans, editor in chief of Random House, and Tina Brown, Dick’s corporate colleague at the New Yorker—the paparazzo Ron Galella photographed the many luminaries in attendance, including Dick’s close friends Lauren Bacall, Betty Comden, Adolph Green, and Phyllis Newman. Shirley MacLaine was there, as well as Gay and Nan Talese, Nora Ephron and Nicholas Pileggi, Jann and Jane Wenner, Peter Brant and Stephanie Seymour, Barry Diller and Diane von Furstenberg, Liz Smith, Stockard Channing, Kate Moss, Donatella Versace, and Liza Minnelli. The Times reported that the hosts, along with Adam Gopnik, offered “a mixed bag of encomiums.” In one picture, Diane Sawyer, by then married to Mike Nichols, sits in the foreground with John Richardson, the art historian and Picasso biographer; Dick is standing behind them looking ever the eminence in his tuxedo and with his shock of gray hair, his arm around Nicole Wisniak, sharing a moment of hilarity with his dearest friend Mike Nichols. They are at that moment the very picture of worldly success.
For Dick’s seventieth birthday, Bill Bachmann, Dick’s personal assistant, surreptitiously solicited over one hundred Happy Birthday video tributes from Dick’s close friends, professional colleagues, and meaningful acquaintances, and assembled them into a two-and-a-half-hour videotape entitled To Be 70. In one video recording after another, the people in Dick’s life offered heartfelt wishes, many with charming originality, recalling either a unique moment between them or their shared history or their like-minded sensibilities. Perhaps the most telling tribute of all was from Evie, on whom, despite their years-long separation, he had always kept a tender and protective eye. “Happy birthday to the sweetest man in the whole world,” she says to him.
“Dick was totally surprised,” Bachmann said, adding that he always protested the notion of celebrating any of his birthdays. Yet Bachmann succeeded in delighting Dick with his video surprise. “He and the entire staff gathered in his studio to view the video in its entirety.” On the occasion of his actual birthday, Dick and Nicole Wisniak celebrated in Venice. “On the afternoon of my seventieth birthday,” Dick later recalled, “I sat on Atilla the Hon’s throne in Torcello and thought about the fettucini at Harry’s Bar.” That evening Nicole presented him with a framed original letter by Proust and a bottle of Grand Vin de Lafite Rothschild 1923, the year of his birth. It wasn’t easy to take Richard Avedon’s breath away.
ON JULY 22, 1990, John Avedon, thirty-seven years old, the divorced father of two small boys, and Maura Moynihan, thirty-two years old, joined hands in marriage at the Avedon family compound in Montauk situated on a promontory overlooking the vast blue sea. The bride was the daughter of US senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York. When she arrived in New York after graduating from Harvard, she worked closely with Andy Warhol, conducting interviews for his magazine by day and socializing in his luminous orbit at night. Meanwhile, her interest in Eastern religions—Buddhism and Hinduism—deepened, and in 1989, when she began to work with Tibetan refugees, she met the Dalai Lama. It was in this context that she attended a benefit for Tibet House one evening and met John Avedon, whose book In Exile from the Land of Snows she held in high regard.
Among the two hundred people gathered at the wedding were Senator Moynihan and his wife, an architectural historian; the brother and sister-in-law of the Dalai Lama, who traveled all the way from Dharmsala; and a broad swath of friends not only of the bride and the groom, but also of the groom’s father, whose outsize circle of intimates included plenty of boldface names including Mike Nichols, Diane Sawyer, and Renata Adler. Dick had built the Montauk house a decade earlier, designed by the architect Harris Feinn in the relaxed New England shingle-style characteristic of the conventional architecture of the East End, with a gabled roof and dormer windows and sweeping views of the ocean. The house was designed as a comfortable family gathering spot and used primarily by John and his young family. One wing was set aside for Evie’s use whenever she wanted to visit. There was a small guest cottage, too, where Dick preferred to stay when he was there, which was not often.
Maura recounted Dick’s singular attentiveness to his mother, “whom he adored,” she said. Dick’s lifetime support of his mother, and of his wife, Evie, underscored his bedrock sense of family responsibility, regardless of his shortcomings as a husband and father. “Dick included Evie in everything,” Maura said about her in-laws, adding that Evie’s apartment was filled with books and Evie was always giving her new books to read when she visited. “Dick loved Evie very much. At our wedding, she came, and they sat together.” Dick also supported John and Betti while they were married and continued to provide financial support for his grandchildren after the divorce.
Dick and Senator Moynihan “genuinely admired each other,” Maura said about her father and her father-in-law. “They were both Depression-era boys, and they recognized the same qualities in one another: they were both driven; they shared a love of the theater; they drank champagne together and talked about Rogers and Hammerstein. My father’s favorite movie was Duck Soup and Dick loved Groucho Marx.”
Betti, John’s ex-wife, was Elizabeth Paul Avedon and Betsy, Keith Avedon’s widow, was Elizabeth Cox Avedon. Their names seemed to be the only thing they had in common. One was the mother of Dick’s grandchildren, Matthew and William; the other the mother of his godson, Luke. When Dick’s grandchildren came over to play at the studio, Luke, who was a year younger than Matthew, would join them. And because Betti and Betsy both lived downtown, the children played together—skateboarding or Rollerblading—in Union Square Park.
One month after the publication of An Autobiography, Dick was slapped with an ugly lawsuit. Betti, his ex-daughter-in-law, accused him of exploiting nude photographs of his grandchildren and behaving in sexually inappropriate ways. Dick was devastated when he read the accusation, and indignant. He opened the documents in the evening, and he called Norma to come over immediately. He issued an official denial through his lawyer, Martin Garbus: “The statements made about me are false and slanderous. . . . It is a tragedy for my grandchildren that Elizabeth would try to gain a financial benefit by launching this kind of attack.” For people who knew Dick well, the charge did not seem remotely plausible. Everyone rallied to his defense. Dick’s mother said she knew he could never do a thing like that. His son, John, the children’s father, came to Dick’s rescue as well, quoted in the press as saying that “only a vindictive and troubled woman could misuse her children and lie so blatantly about my father for financial gain.” Despite Betti’s claims, Betsy Avedon remained confident about Dick’s positive influence on Luke. On October 26, 1993, the New York Post ran an item with the headline “Angry Avedon Denies Sexual Accusations,” reporting that he was being sued by his former daughter-in-law for $5 million.
According to Norma, Matthew and William “were inured to nudity”; their parents were never self-conscious about being naked in front of them—something Dick had cautioned them about—and it was not unusual for the boys to run around the house without their clothes on. After all, Dick was a grandparent—and a photographer. When his grandchildren were at play, whether running around the house naked or throwing a ball on the lawn in their shorts, he took pictures, as any grandparent would. The pictures in question were six years old and had been used in the custody trial.
The lawsuit came on the heels of the publication of An Autobiography, which had come out a month before and about which there were numerous articles in the press—including the announcement of Avedon’s ten-book deal for $10 million. Mary Shanahan was given prominent design credit on the title page, essentially obscuring Betti’s early role on the project. At the same time, the accusation of child abuse had copycat resonance as Mia Farrow’s accusations about Woody Allen’s behavior toward her daughter, Soon-Yi Previn—and the subsequent trial—were just then dominating the media.
John and Betti’s marriage ended in the late 1980s after John learned of her affair with a famous actor. The divorce had been messy, and the child custody battle ugly. When Betti learned about John’s engagement to Maura, her behavior became vitriolic. One day Maura appeared in the Avedon studio to be photographed before the wedding, and Betti, who was still on the studio payroll as a designer, was visibly shaken. In early 1991, John and Maura had a son, Michael. Dick bought them a house in Washington, DC, where they could be close to Maura’s parents, “which was good for my son,” Maura said, while John was working on a book about the Dalai Lama. “We did go to the Montauk house in the summers,” she added. “I have very happy memories of my son playing with Dick and his half brothers in the Montauk house.”
On January 5, 1994, a court order was signed by both parties that concluded “there are no findings of misconduct on Mr. Avedon’s part.” It was determined at the trial that Dick’s pictures were no different from family pictures taken by any grandparent. Both parties signed a confidentiality agreement. Dick was not ordered by the court to make any payment, but, according to conversations Norma Stevens recorded in her book, he paid Betti $500,000 to put an end to the ordeal.
IN THE EARLY 1990S, conversations began between Dick and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, about a retrospective of his work. Sarah Greenough, curator of photography, remembers that her department was just beginning to collect photographs by individual artists “in depth,” a curatorial term to describe the acquisition of multiple pieces by an artist to be able to reflect the essential vision driving the work. The National Gallery wanted to do an exhibition of Avedon’s work from all his previous museum shows—the Minneapolis Institute of Art; the Museum of Modern Art show of photographs of his father; the Marlborough gallery show of portraits; the Metropolitan Museum of Art fashion show; and the Amon Carter Museum commission of the American West. All the work exhibited would then be given to the National Gallery for its permanent collection. It seemed like a worthy tribute to Avedon’s career and, as the country’s official museum in the nation’s capital, a logical destination for the work: the museum’s curatorial regard for photographic prints was unparalleled, its conservation expertise first rate; and inclusion in the collection was tantamount to an official acknowledgment of the work as a national treasure. Negotiations ended, though, when Dick expected curatorial control over the exhibition and authority over any and all museum publications of his work. This did not comport with institutional policy, and the National Gallery said no.
Soon after those talks fell apart, discussions began about an Avedon retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 1991, David Ross was named director of the Whitney, which, at the time, was housed in a Brutalist architectural masterpiece on Madison Avenue, designed by Marcel Breuer. “It was the first show I wanted to do,” Ross said about an Avedon retrospective.
The rapport first established between Dick and David Ross at the University Art Museum in Berkeley in 1980 evolved into a lifelong friendship, one that proved to be significant in the circuitous route that led to the Whitney show. Ross was hired away from the Berkeley museum to become director of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston in 1982. Before Ross moved to Boston, he accompanied Dick on one of his road trips through the American West. He watched as Dick made his portraits in southern Colorado, observing firsthand the way he charmed absolute strangers into performing for his camera. “I believe that his work advanced the form of portraiture in photography,” Ross said. “He was an enormously inventive artist. . . . His giant portraits were literally his own invention, as was his understanding of the ways in which reading a photograph on the wall was so different from reading photos in magazines or books. That is why he did both so well, and in many ways, revolutionized the display of photographs in gallery spaces.”
When Ross arrived in New York, the Whitney’s curatorial staff didn’t consider photography very important. Even though the museum had mounted a large Mapplethorpe show in 1988, it did not yet possess a photography collection. Instead, artists like Cindy Sherman were in the painting collection. “I believed that Dick had not gotten his due,” Ross said. “I remember well my lunch with him and his frustration at being only considered for his fashion work in his hometown, and his pleasure when we agreed to the exhibition project.” When Ross told Leonard Lauder, then president of the board of the Whitney, about his intention to do an Avedon show, Lauder quietly uttered, “It couldn’t be Penn?”
Ross brought in Jane Livingston, a long-distinguished curator at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, who had left that museum to work on her own projects. Jane and Dick, along with Mary Shanahan, his designer, installed the show. The Avedon studio brought in bright halogen lights to replace the Whitney’s more sedate lighting system, which is the kind of thing they might not have been able to afford had it not been for Kodak’s deep pockets.
The Whitney show, called Richard Avedon: Evidence, 1944–1994, opened in March 1994. There were three private events before the official opening on March 29. On March 18, a very select group had been invited for an evening walk-through with drinks and hors d’oeuvres, for which Dick could not stop himself from sending a personal invitation to John Szarkowski, perhaps one last desperate attempt at seeking approval from the by then former curator at MoMA: “I’m going to have a private viewing of my exhibition at the Whitney for the people I care about, and before anyone else sees it. It will be just me and my work, and I would love it if you and your guest could be there.” Szarkowski responded only after the event had taken place, and if only to apologize for having been away. The grander, star-studded events on March 23 and March 29 were featured in the New York Times.
One gallery in the show presented four facing mural portraits: the Chicago Seven, the Mission Council, the Warhol Factory, and Allen Ginsberg’s family. Another gallery was painted black with pictures of the Berlin Wall on New Year’s Eve, hung in the same manner as his Chicago Seven mural portraits at the Minneapolis Institute of Art in 1970. He included a set of the Vietnamese women who had been monstrously scarred from napalm. There were drifters and field hands from the American West series that seemed to “walk out of the pages of ‘The Grapes of Wrath’—their eyebrows are diabolical fringes, their eyes windows onto a universe of misery,” writes Kay Larson in her Washington Post review of the show. “Truckers, coal miners, housewives are on an equal footing with the famous—George Wallace, Dwight Eisenhower, Francis Bacon.” Larson describes the entire fourth floor as “a gallery of police mug shots taken by a brilliant camera master who sees through his subjects’ souls with the pitiless candor of God. Avedon does deserve the moniker ‘artist.’”
Very few critics agreed. The show was pilloried. “Richard Avedon has the instincts of a great court painter,” wrote Mark Stevens in a review in New York magazine. “His style is essentially a court style, his way with the camera worldly, fluid, knowing. His particular court, rather than being a fixed place, is more like un idée fixe shared by many people—call it smart and powerful New York. There’s no king, but stylishness itself reigns.”
Stevens makes a case for Avedon’s right to photograph the downtrodden people of the American West, and while he considers a few of the portraits to be of significance, in totality, they “are flawed by self-congratulation. They’re so immodest in their portrayal of modest or broken lives—completely without the tact, like perfect pitch in music, of a Walker Evans or Robert Frank.”
Arthur Danto couldn’t have agreed more in a four-page denunciation of the work in The Nation. “Given the distance between the world in which [Avedon] attained his great success and the world whose conspicuous problems are so clearly of concern to him, there is a lived tension in his work that is of an almost tragic dimension, particularly in view of the disproportion between the undeniable artistic merit of his best commercial work and the largely undistinguished quality of what he doubtless regards is his real art”—his portraiture. Danto dismissed the blank white background as Avedon’s “signature and his crutch,” concluding that it serves as “a wall against the real world, for which even the most vivid photographic imagination is a paltry substitute.”
Vince Aletti, in the Village Voice, bestowed greater regard on the artist and the work: “His photos from the last two decades are increasingly the work of a despairing, often pessimistic social observer, a man who sees, finally, through life’s sad, corrupt masquerade. It’s the damned human condition staring us down again—from both sides of the camera.” Aletti is critical of the show because it fails to present what he considers to be Avedon’s liveliest work, his fashion images. “For Avedon to reduce his own fashion photos to a career footnote is, if nothing else, perversely pleasure denying.”
In the Times, Michael Kimmelman, the chief art critic, focused on the conspicuous conflicts of interest that abetted Avedon’s apotheosis into the art world firmament. “It was hard not to notice that last week The New Yorker, where Mr. Avedon is the staff photographer, was especially chockablock with Avedon photographs. The co-publisher of the exhibition catalogue, with an essay by The New Yorker’s art critic, Adam Gopnik, is Random House, which is owned by S. I. Newhouse, who also owns The New Yorker.”
Kimmelman was justified in excoriating the shameless promotional bloc composed of the prestigious entities for their single employee. Yet when Kimmelman finally turns to the show, he, too, bemoans the absence of the fashion photographs: “If you expect Dovima and the elephants at the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris, forget it. Forget Sunny Harnett leaning over the roulette wheel at the casino at Le Touquet. I don’t know whether the closer analogy is a Picasso retrospective without Cubism or a Woody Allen one without the comedies, but in either case, the disservice is to Mr. Avedon.” Which leaves the portraits, the most fertile soil for Kimmelman’s final assessment of Avedon as an artist: “The problem with his rogues’ gallery of drifters and factory workers from the American West isn’t that they’re meanly exploitative, as critics have moaned. The problem is that the theatricality of Mr. Avedon’s portraits isn’t absorbing.” Ultimately, he concludes, with his own jaundiced eye, that they are too hollow to constitute “art.”
In the collective judgment of the reviewers, Avedon had overstaged himself at the expense of the work, and the work he put forward did not conform to their view of who he was as a photographer. While he wanted to position himself as an artist apart from his fashion work, his fashion work was so good that he became, in his own mind, a victim of his own attributes.
Evidence, 1944–1994, the catalog for the Whitney show—and the second book of his ten-book deal—skews very heavily into autobiography, to the point of self-aggrandizement. Nearly half the book is designed with a chronological graph of every picture in the show above a red line, keyed to a biographical record of Avedon’s life in pictures below the red line. Once again, the artist can’t help himself, insinuating his own life story to such an extent that it obfuscates the work.
The Avedon catalog includes an essay by Jane Livingston in which she methodically anatomizes Avedon’s career and asserts his importance: “Avedon didn’t feel obliged to worship the ‘integrity’ of the medium or to follow the rules of camera format, the constraints of photographic paper, or the classic traditions of the craft itself.” She makes a case for the radical experimentation he employed, and about which the critics so often missed the point, as the imagery he created was so clearly original, and impossible to ignore. “Permission to break all the rules,” she writes, “at least since the advent of Robert Rauschenberg and Andy Warhol, and passed on through Cindy Sherman and her many confrères and imitators, has somehow been granted only to those artists whose declared intentions are comfortably outside of the defined limits of ‘straight’ photography.”
Adam Gopnik contributed an essay to Evidence, as well, entitled “The Light Writer,” in which he explains for the ages the significance of Avedon’s work: “It is not so much that each portrait makes an inarguable case about each sitter—each is really, truly like this—but that each makes a general case about the intensity of human character: that to be human, at least in Avedon’s time, is, in effect, to first become a character. It scarcely matters what this character is, or who invented it, photographer or subject. To burn through against a white background is to become a member of a disturbed family of the spirit.”
Avedon used to say about his portraits that it didn’t matter “who” they were, “just look at their faces.” The subject, of course, particularly one of public notoriety, was aware of the act of being photographed—an “act,” to be sure—and their presentation was never intended to be “genuine,” in the sense of capturing the truest essence of their nature. As Gopnik argues, “They require a complicity between the subject and the photographer not about the ‘authentic self,’ but about the power of concentrated performance to express psychological intensity.”
Every major publication reviewed the Whitney exhibit. There were features in magazines like Newsweek, People, and Vogue; there was a program of public panels about the exhibit at the museum; and Avedon appeared on several television talk shows. “I think he expected poor reviews and I don’t think he cared,” Mary Shanahan said. “Dick loved the show, and he spent much time at the museum interacting with the viewers, who were very positive.” Still, Dick never took criticism easily, and the reviews from serious critics rankled, whether he acknowledged the wounds to anyone or not.
Yet Ross was onto something with the Avedon show. Problematic though it was for the grandiosity of its presentation and the overbearing media attention, it was the right idea at the right time. By the early 1990s, despite the prejudices that lingered in some quarters of the art world, photography had gained respect in the fine arts, so much so that postmodern artists and critics were compelled to rip the medium apart.
The instrument itself—the simple dumb machine that is the camera—is capable of providing profound existential evidence that deepens our understanding of our very experience of being. Avedon’s output with that instrument only continues to make the case for photography as an art form—and his own work in that medium is among the best in the twentieth century. “Photography is the common language of modern history,” Holland Cotter once said. “It’s everywhere; and everyone, in some way, understands it.”
IN EARLY 1992, AVEDON offered a master class through the International Center of Photography. It was advertised as four weekend sessions, one a month, over the course of a semester, yet because of Dick’s wide-ranging commitments and fluid schedule, as well as a generosity of intention, the master class turned into a tutorial that stretched into many more intermittent weekends over several years. Out of 250 applicants, Dick accepted 16 students. Among them were Diane Arbus’s daughter Amy, who, by then in her late thirties, had been photographing regularly for the Village Voice; and Lizzie Himmel, the daughter of Dick’s early confreres Lillian Bassman and Paul Himmel, also in her late thirties, who had a successful career as an editorial photographer, shooting for many publications. “I was bored with what I was doing, and my mother said, ‘Take the class with Dick,’” Lizzie said, recalling her motivation for applying to the workshop.
The class took place at Dick’s studio, and the students were required to fulfill assignments he gave them from session to session—in the genres of the family snapshot, portraiture, fashion, and reportage—and then to discuss and critique the results. In the first session, Dick went around the room and told every student why he had selected them out of the swarm of applicants. Chris Callis, an editorial and commercial photographer with regular assignments from Esquire and the New York Times Magazine, was thrilled to have been accepted. He remembers Dick saying, “If I had to light the Empire State Building, I would get Chris to do it,” the point being that Dick regarded Callis’s technical creativity as his photographic strength.
The first step of the “self-portrait” assignment occurred in class. Dick went around the room and asked each student to describe a photograph that might represent a portrait of who they were. Half the students described pictures with water. Amy Arbus referred to a picture of a swimming horse “with crazed eyes,” by Sylvia Plachy, and decided on the spot that she would photograph herself in water. Given that she was in the city, the only water available to her was in the bathtub. She remembers being so distracted by the technical obstacles, trying to situate the tripod on the sink and balance the camera, that she wasn’t thinking about the implications of the picture. “Then, when my toe hit the water, I realized that my mom died in a tub,” she said. She proceeded to make a series of pictures of herself naked in the tub with the camera suspended directly above her. When she showed them in class, Dick, who had witnessed her mother’s dead body in the bathtub, was flabbergasted. He asked his assistant to blow up Amy’s pictures as large as possible on the copier and put them up on the wall. He took Amy aside and said, “Can I tell the class?” They decided not to discuss the circumstances of her mother’s suicide until the students could react directly to Amy’s pictures. “There were two incredible things about them,” Amy said. “One is that I look like I’m seventeen”—Amy’s age when her mother died—“and the other is that they were very intense and emotionally upsetting.”
In fulfilling the class assignment, Amy left the influence of her mother behind, and Dick would later write about her bathtub series in Aperture: “[She] went to a place that had no precedent in her own, her mother’s, or anyone else’s work. . . . In these portraits, she appears to me to be simultaneously the one giving birth and the one being born as her fully realized self.”
“It was incredibly cathartic and poetic and moving, and the fact that it was Dick who got me to do this,” Amy said, not only about her self-portraits, but also about the workshop itself. “I was so knocked out because he did so much for me; I mean, he changed my life. It’s not an exaggeration.”
For the class on fashion photography, Dick had arranged for all the students to observe a daylong shoot in his studio with the model Stephanie Seymour, after which they were assigned to make a fashion photograph. The full Avedon operation was in attendance: Polly Mellen, the fashion editor; Oribe, the hairstylist; and Glenn Marziali, the makeup artist. The picture, in which Seymour stands in a sheer black sheath and lifts the dress to reveal her naked crotch, was being shot for Egoïste, which was footing the bill for the entire day, estimated by Lizzie Himmel to have cost $100,000. “I wasn’t bored, because I got to do the reflector for the crotch shot,” Himmel said. “The dress was transparent. I’m sure Dick thought a lot about the transparency and a lot about shock value and a lot about the fact that he wanted to shock the class.”
In early 1993, only a few months after Dick’s appointment to the New Yorker, the magazine had issued a press release: “Avedon’s Master Class to Contribute to the New Yorker: “In a move to create a new generation of photographic talent, Richard Avedon will supervise a group of sixteen photographers for editorial work in the New Yorker, it was announced today by Tina Brown.” Shortly after, Chris Callis received a call from the magazine: “Are you available right now to photograph Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman?” The sheikh was the leader of a mosque whose members were being charged with the World Trade Center bombing. The New Yorker sent a car to pick Callis up, and he was driven to a gas station in New Jersey, where a stranger approached them and searched the back seat to confirm that Callis was a photographer with photographic equipment. He was then driven to an undisclosed location where the sheikh was in hiding. Callis’s photograph ran a quarter page in size in the April 4, 1993, issue of the New Yorker. “The only rule Dick had about his students working for the New Yorker was that none of their pictures could run full page,” Callis said.
Eileen Travell, then twenty-six, had studied painting and photography at Bennington, and was working as a staff photographer at the Metropolitan Museum, making photographic copies of works of art for the museum archives. “I was just transported,” she said about the master class. “Dick could talk about a picture for hours. He loved Julia Margaret Cameron. He could talk about our pictures, always relating them to art history.” Eileen became something of a favored student, and on weekdays she would sometimes stop by the studio and have coffee with Dick before going to work. Dick drew her in emotionally, but then he would impose icy, almost eerie distances between them. In early 1994, Dick assigned Eileen to photograph Harold Brodkey and his wife, Ellen Schwamm, for an autobiographical piece Brodkey had written for the New Yorker, in which he divulged that he was dying of AIDS while also brushing away, as if virtually nonexistent, his homosexual past. Dick chose not to photograph Brodkey himself because of their often-volatile friendship. “Harold is like barbed wire,” Dick told Eileen. “The closer you get to him, the more he’ll cut you.” Her double portrait of Brodkey and his wife ran in the February 7, 1994, issue of the magazine. Years later, it finally clicked for her: “Dick was talking about himself when he was talking about Harold.”
ON JANUARY 24, 1996, the American Masters documentary Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light aired on national television. It had been the brainchild of Susan Lacy, the show’s executive producer, who chose subjects for the series based on their cultural significance. “If you were to make a book about the ten most important photographers in the twentieth century, Avedon would be one of the chapter heads,” she said. She hired Helen Whitney, a veteran television news documentary filmmaker, to direct it. Lacy sent Whitney to Dick’s studio for an initial meeting to see if it was a good fit. “We had one of those magical lunches, beautifully served, over several hours, with Norma present,” Helen said. “It was fun, there was laughter, and he was completely on board.” Production began while Dick’s exhibit was still up at the Whitney Museum. The film took about a year to complete.
“He gave me free rein, let me look at all his contact sheets,” Whitney said. “I prowled around the studio. He trusted me seeing personal letters, things he had written.” But then, she would set up a shoot with him, arriving with her equipment and the crew, and he would keep them waiting, either because he was suddenly in the middle of something else, or he was in a less-than-perfect mood, or he had to prepare himself for the “performance” before he would let her film him in seemingly spontaneous action. “We had a difficult midperiod, as I recall,” she said. And yet, she described what seemed to be a genuinely affectionate relationship. He took her to dinner, and to the theater, and gave her tutorials on the history of photography. “He was a great listener, and he would pull things out of you,” she said. “He was sympathetic, and yet his seductive powers were also strategic.”
Dick could be disarming as he exhibited a kind of vulnerability one does not expect from a man of his generation; he had a way of revealing things about himself that seemed so personal: “I have to be in touch with my fragility—the man in me, the woman in me, the child in me, the grandfather in me,” he says in the documentary. “All of these things have to be kept alive.” By no means is this insight about himself false, exactly, but neither was he consistent in his adherence to the truth of such self-knowledge. He was, in fact, quite fragile, perhaps even more so than he wanted to reveal, yet around his fragility had grown a carapace with the sharpest of edges. He could level peremptory judgments, shut people out without warning, drop the conversation, or turn his attention elsewhere so quickly that the people around him were left reeling, at times cut to the quick.
“It’s something about madness, rage, and energy that connects us,” André Gregory says about their friendship in the documentary, standing with Dick under the apple trees on Dick’s property in Montauk. “I don’t have many men friends who I can talk to about anything and everything, where there is no macho competition going on.” Dick smiles, agrees, and confirms the depth of their friendship, but then undercuts it with a sharp-edged retort. “I just don’t want you to be more successful than I am.”
The documentary received mixed notices. “Why is it that once commercial photographers or illustrators get really rich and famous, they suddenly start thinking about being regarded as fine artists instead?” wrote Christopher Knight, the art critic for the Los Angeles Times, in his review. “Richard Avedon is a notorious example of the phenomenon—one of the greatest fashion photographers ever, responsible for an industrywide overhaul in how modern fashionability would henceforth be represented, who in recent decades has noisily insisted on ‘upgrading’ his stature to Artist.”
While it’s true that Avedon had spent years trying to be taken seriously as an artist, the fact that every one of his exhibits was generated by curatorial interest from within an exhibiting museum or gallery—and not proposed by the artist—was often overlooked. Ted Hartwell at the Minneapolis Institute of Art approached Dick to do the show in 1970. It was Paul Katz’s idea at the Marlborough gallery to do an Avedon show in 1975. The Metropolitan Museum show in 1978 had begun in John McKendry’s imagination six years earlier. Jim Elliott invited Dick to have the show at the University Art Museum in Berkeley. The Amon Carter Museum sought Dick out for the commission of the American West photographs and the subsequent show. The National Gallery in Washington had approached Dick about doing the retrospective that was never realized. And David Ross was intent on Avedon being his first show at the Whitney in 1994. In each case, the curators already believed in him as an artist.
By 1996, the attitude that Avedon was still an arriviste in the art world was simply a prejudice he could not shake. Christopher Knight’s dismissal of Avedon’s achievement by claiming he was interested in “upgrading his stature to Artist” spoke volumes about the taint of commerce that still hovered around the Avedon name. No wonder Dick didn’t want to place his fashion work alongside his portraiture in the museum setting; he understood that “fashion” was a ghetto within the world of commerce, so he was doubly scarred. And yet, none of that even mattered in the context of the prejudices against photography itself. Despite the fact that, in 1991, Avedon had won the international Hasselblad Award—the highest honor for any artist in the realm of photography—photography was still not fully accepted as an art form.
In the documentary, Dick discusses the pictures he took of his father before he died: “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 said to his analyst years later, “Could it possibly be that I was telling myself it was a kind of love, when really, it was a kind of murder?”
The camera cuts to an interview with Dick’s son, John—handsome, self-possessed, and well spoken—as he disparages his father’s disturbing pictures of his grandfather. He calls photography “an invasive art.” Just as Dick posited to his analyst the possibility that his motivation in taking the pictures of his father was a form of murder, John Avedon asserts his own brand of annihilation of his father, one oedipal rivalry following another.
Upon seeing the filmed interview of his son, Dick offered a defense of his work: “It’s just strange to me that anyone would ever think that a work of art shouldn’t be disturbing or shouldn’t be invasive. That’s the property of a work of art; that’s the arena of a work of art. To disturb is to make you think, to make you feel. If my work didn’t disturb from time to time, it would be a failure in my own eyes.”
One night during a weekend filming session at Dick’s house in Montauk, Helen Whitney chose a book from the shelf, Kafka’s Letter to His Father, to take with her to bed. In it, Kafka first sets out to describe the condition of their relationship: “To you it seemed like this: you had worked hard your whole life, sacrificed everything for your children, particularly me, as a result I lived ‘like a lord,’ had complete freedom to study whatever I wanted, knew where my next meal was coming from and therefore had no reason to worry about anything; for this you asked no gratitude.” Kafka goes on to then indict his father for proceeding through life with an attitude of impunity about the power dynamic of their relationship. “This, your usual analysis, I agree with only in so far as I also believe you to be entirely blameless for our estrangement. But I too am equally and utterly blameless. If I could bring you to acknowledge this, then—although a new life would not be possible, for that we are both much too old—there could yet be a sort of peace, not an end to your unrelenting reproaches, but at least a mitigation of them.”
In the morning Whitney left the book out on the dining room table. That night, Dick read it and, the following morning, he told her he hadn’t been able to sleep—addled as he was by grief.