RICHARD Avedon ran down the staircase onto the tarmac in San Juan, collected his bag, and headed for the hotel where James Baldwin was staying. It was June of 1963, and it had been hard to get Baldwin to find time to work on their project. In January, The Fire Next Time, in which Baldwin considered his experience of the Black church and the Nation of Islam, became a bestseller, and Baldwin had been on every television talk show in America. In May, Baldwin’s face was on the cover of Time, the interview with him following a lead article on violence in Birmingham, Alabama. On May 24, he’d organized a meeting of Black leaders—Lorraine Hansberry, Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, Kenneth Clark, Clarence Jones, Baldwin’s brother David, and Jerome Smith, a twenty-five-year-old who had been badly beaten on the Mother’s Day freedom ride. They had then gone to suggest to Attorney General Robert Kennedy that the Kennedy administration ought to take a moral stand against segregation. John Kennedy finally made a speech to that effect on June 11. The next day, in Mississippi, Medgar Evers, the state’s chief NAACP officer, then investigating a racially motivated murder, was killed. Avedon had raised the idea of a collaboration with Baldwin before this season of intensified violence and celebrity, and Baldwin had expressed interest, but it wasn’t until Avedon said that he was willing to come to Puerto Rico, where Baldwin was going on vacation, that Baldwin finally began to pay attention.
If he arrived in the late afternoon, Avedon probably found Baldwin and his sometime lover Lucien Happersberger at the hotel bar. Happersberger was from Switzerland and had first met Baldwin in Paris. Though he married three times, Happersberger remained a close companion of Baldwin for many decades. The three of them sat and drank and talked about what was happening in the south. The murder of Evers was constantly on Baldwin’s mind, and he was worried about Martin Luther King and whether nonviolence would in the end succeed. Through the winter of 1963 King had been organizing against segregation in Birmingham—2,500 Black people, including many children, had been arrested and nine of ten Black families had stopped patronizing white businesses there. This was progress, but of a troubled and painful kind. Someone ordered another round. It felt a little strange to sit in a bar in Puerto Rico and have a drink and watch the sun go down.
In the morning, the late morning, they began to work on the book in earnest. Avedon had from the first thought that they would approach the work from independent angles and was glad that Baldwin agreed. They decided that Baldwin would write an essay, and Avedon would go out and shoot some new photographs, and then they would see what they had. This wasn’t the first time Avedon and Baldwin had worked together—at DeWitt Clinton High there had been The Magpie, and after they graduated it had been Baldwin’s idea to do a book of Avedon’s photographs and Baldwin’s writing that they were going to call Harlem Doorways. Around that time, 1945 or so, Avedon had taken a number of photographs of Baldwin, one of which he later included in his book The Sixties; he enjoyed pointing out that he’d known Baldwin long before Baldwin was a famous novelist and civil rights figure.
In high school, they’d been fairly close; Baldwin had been, as was true in his relationships with many of his white friends, a symbol for Avedon. Once they had gone home together after school, to the Avedons’ apartment on East Eighty-fifth Street, and the doorman had refused to take Baldwin up in the elevator, sending the boys to the stairs. Telling the story later, Avedon explained, “I was so ashamed. We got up to the apartment and I told my mother what had happened. My mother was a delicate woman and small. She walked out to the hall, and she pushed the button to call the elevator man and when the door opened, she punched him.” His mother told the man that in future he would bring all her son’s friends up. But, through the whole scene, “Baldwin? Impassive.”
Perhaps this incident was paired in Baldwin’s mind with the time he had brought a Jewish friend home to Harlem and been hit by his father. Avedon went to Baldwin’s house, too, in 1946, after Baldwin’s father had died. Avedon took a set of pictures of Baldwin and his sister, sitting at the kitchen table in their mother’s apartment. Avedon kept track of people’s sisters. When he visited Baldwin’s family, Avedon was just starting to take the fashion photographs that would make his name, though it wasn’t until much later that he realized that he always chose brunette models “with fine noses, long throats, oval faces. They were all memories of my sister.”
James Baldwin by Richard Avedon, 1945.
His photographs of Baldwin and of his own sister were on Avedon’s mind in 1963—his sister’s health was precarious, and the country was coming apart. He asked Baldwin if they could do a book together. Baldwin said first Avedon would have to go to a Black bar, to have the experience of being the only white person in the room. Just around that time, as Avedon later remembered it, Ingrid Bergman had been photographed in Italy in a shearling coat, and Avedon had gone out and bought a shearling coat, which at that point no one had, and worn it to a party, and “there was Jimmy, in a shearling coat.” And so the two of them went up to Harlem after the party, wearing their brand-new shearling coats, and went to a bar, “not a regular Harlem bar where white people sometimes went, but a very down bar.” Avedon was certainly the only white person there, and “at that time, that meant something.”
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In Puerto Rico, there were moments when the collaboration was easy. Just like the old Magpie days, Avedon later said, sitting around and talking. Baldwin sometimes did imitations. They talked of “despair, dishonesty, the things that keep people from knowing each other.” Sometimes Baldwin was angry. He would suddenly transform into the representative of his race and say bitter things like, “I’ve hoed a lot of cotton. You wouldn’t have had this country if it hadn’t been for me.” Happersberger carried no American guilt with him and was gentle and persuasive with Baldwin, but still it took a while to bring Baldwin back. Sitting in the hotel in San Juan, Avedon and Baldwin divided the book into three sections: the America that refuses to see; insanity; and redemption. Avedon felt that redemption was hardly justified by the political climate, but “Jimmy insisted; he said, ‘You have to give them that.’”
After Avedon left Puerto Rico, he arranged through a southern friend, Marguerite Lamkin, to go south and take photographs of George Wallace and Leander Perez and the Daughters of the American Revolution. Avedon, Lamkin, and an assistant were all staying in a motel in Louisiana when the phone rang late one night and a voice on the other end said, “We know where you are, nigger lover, and we’re coming for you.” It was Lamkin’s idea to hide in the East Louisiana State Mental Hospital, where they were planning to photograph anyway. The images that resulted from their ten-day stay were quite different from Avedon’s other portraits. The people had, unusually, settings, which made the photographs seem humane and more documentary than the later photographs of napalm victims and highway drifters whom Avedon shot in bare existential settings.
Baldwin, meanwhile, was not writing at all, and Avedon was getting frustrated. He followed Baldwin to Finland—he felt he was trailing him around the world—and there, finally, Baldwin wrote the text. Baldwin needed talk and drink to start writing, and he needed company all the time. Avedon was struggling to hold on to his sense of his old friend, who seemed to be in an argument with someone every night. Baldwin was worried that none of his white friends was really his friend, and, as one civil rights leader after another was assassinated, he was more and more afraid for his life.
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When Nothing Personal came out in 1964, the critics were angry, and reviews were scathing. The book, at first torn apart for being both too liberal and too conservative, came with time to be understood not primarily as the political treatise people had expected but, contrary to its title, as something very personal, a study of faces. Avedon’s photographs were of couples at their weddings, William Casby, who had been born in slavery, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the small son of Martin Luther King, Marilyn Monroe, Eisenhower, Arthur Miller, Malcolm X, the patients in the mental hospital. Baldwin had written of the humiliating arrest that he and Happersberger had suffered in New York City for no clear reason except that they had been on the sidewalk together; of the death of President Kennedy; and, indirectly, of the death, never mentioned but felt throughout, of Medgar Evers. He wrote of the impoverishment of the American soul; complacency in the face of moral defeat; the hope for a time when “human life is more important than real estate”; and the possibility of redemption through love. The book, a conversation paced by Avedon and Baldwin together, began to draw to its end with a photograph of a light woman holding a dark child as they stood together in the sea. Next to this were Baldwin’s words:
For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have.
A man at the beach held a small child, who stood balanced on his hand above his head. Grainy lights stretched out behind them:
The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out.
Last, on two pages, a group of men and women and two young boys, a few of them white but mostly Black, stood straight and brave together, facing the camera, the only text: “Members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Atlanta, Georgia.”
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Baldwin was gone again when the book came out, leaving the details, as he often did, to his brother David Baldwin and to other people. Someone asked Avedon for a publicity photograph of the two of them together, and so, on September 17, 1964, Avedon went to a photomat. He liked photomats; when he taught photography classes, he always first sent his students to one, saying it was the photographer, not the camera, that mattered. He sat in the booth, and he held up in front of half of his face a folded photograph of James Baldwin that he had brought along with him—reaching his own hand across Baldwin’s forehead—and he pushed the plastic button.
Avedon often discovered something by portraying himself and someone else at the same time. His white-background style came about as the result of two experiments—a self-portrait and a portrait of the writer Renata Adler—in which he found that he could get an almost mythic quality of personality with a dark face on a light ground. In all his work, Avedon strove for a harsh documentation of the intimate. But the double portrait with Baldwin was not about intimacy. There was some other tension along the fault line of the Avedon-Baldwin face.
Richard Avedon, self-portrait, 1969.
James Baldwin and Richard Avedon by Richard Avedon, 1964.
Baldwin, looking at the image, might have thought of W. E. B. Du Bois’s double consciousness or of the one suggested by Henry James. He might have been a little uneasy about whatever it was that Avedon needed from half his Black face. Avedon worried about that, too. The photographer had also become more skeptical of how close a Black American and a white one could be.
Avedon, who would stop taking portraits altogether for the next few years, had suffered a number of losses. Kennedy had been assassinated—the Warren Commission had released its report that September. And Louise Avedon had died in a mental institution at the age of forty-two. Decades later, in an interview, Avedon said that “Louise, the conspiracy between her beauty, her illness and her death, was like a shadow that went right through her and into my photographs.” Still, neither family tragedy nor national mourning was sufficient explanation for the discomfort with which Avedon and Baldwin saw themselves face-to-face. Maybe, when they looked at that image, what really bothered each man was that friends, no matter how hard they cling to each other, remain separate; one is left to write the obituary of the other.
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That day in September, Avedon left the photomat and walked home to his studio. He ran up the stairs to the fourth floor of his building, holding, carefully, in his left hand, the fluttering strip of photos. Taking off his coat with an impatient gesture, protecting the photos as he pulled his arm through the sleeve, he hurried back to his darkroom to make negatives. Then he stood, tense and alert, over the flat pan of developer, imagining the double face, blurry beneath the fluid, gradually emerging on the paper.
