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2004/10/02 21:34
 
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October 1, 2004
Richard Avedon, Dean of Photographers, Is Dead at 81
By ANDY GRUNDBERG
Richard Avedon, whose fashion and portrait photographs helped define America"s image of style, beauty and culture for the last half-century, died today in a hospital in San Antonio, Tex. He was 81 and lived in Manhattan.
The cause was complications of a cerebral hemorrhage suffered last Saturday, said his son, John. Mr. Avedon was in Texas on assignment for The New Yorker magazine, which hired him in 1992 as its first staff photographer.
Mr. Avedon"s photographs captured the freedom, excitement and energy of fashion as it entered an era of transformation and popularization. No matter what the prevailing style, his camera eye always found a way to dramatize its spirit as the fashion world"s creative attention swayed variously from the "New Look" of liberated Paris to pragmatic American sportswear designed in New York, and from the anti-establishment fashion of London"s Carnaby Street to sophisticated, tailored dresses and suits from Milan.
Picking up the trail of such photographic forerunners as Martin Munkacsi, Mr. Avedon revolutionized the 20th-century art of fashion photography, imbuing it with touches of both gritty realism and outrageous fantasy and instilling it with a relentlessly experimental drive. So great a hold did Mr. Avedon"s fashion photography come to have on the public imagination that when he was in his 30"s he was the inspiration for Dick Avery, the fashion photographer played by Fred Astaire in the 1957 film "Funny Face." He also appeared on the cover of Newsweek magazine in 1978 while a retrospective exhibition of his fashion pictures and portraits was on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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Despite the widespread recognition of his work, Mr. Avedon remained relatively insulated from the world, spending much of his working life in the white confines of his studio, where he could maintain control of his lighting and, in most cases, of his models and portrait subjects as well. Although he traveled widely on assignment, he was a born and bred New Yorker and made Manhattan his home for his entire life.
While best known for his published pictures in Vogue and Harper"s Bazaar, Mr. Avedon had what amounted to a second, simultaneous career in the art world. His photographs were first shown at the Smithsonian Institution in 1962 and most recently in the spring of 1994 in a retrospective exhibition organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art. He also maintained a lucrative sideline creating advertising photographs for clients like Revlon and Christian Dior.
Thin and wiry, with a shock of unkempt hair, Richard Avedon had a terrierlike intensity that could exhaust those who worked with him. Although for most of his life he maintained an overstuffed schedule in his East Side photography studio, he also found time to read, attend the theater and visit museum shows, staying conversant with the cultural and artistic life of his day. In addition, he supported civil rights and other social causes financially and with his photography; in the mid-60"s, he trained young black photographers to record the marches and sit-ins in the South.
When Mr. Avedon became the first staff photographer for The New Yorker, , which had previously used only small photographs, and those sparingly, U.S.A. Today suggested that calling Mr. Avedon a staff photographer was like calling Michelangelo the local house painter. But the staff photographer himself saw the new position as an opportunity to progress beyond fashion.
"I"ve photographed just about everyone in the world," Mr. Avedon said. "But what I hope to do is photograph people of accomplishment, not celebrity, and help define the difference once again."
Tina Brown, the editor who hired Mr. Avedon, promised at the time that he "can do anything he wants." The master more than proved that the confidence was merited.
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His New Yorker pictures, ranging from his never-before-published shots of Marilyn Monroe in 1994 to a resonant rendering of Christopher Reeve in his wheelchair this year, were topics of wide discussion. Perhaps even more so was his patent disregard for orthodox sensibilities, as reflected by the uproar surrounding some of his nude photographs, including the actresses Tilda Swinton in 1993 and Charlize Theron this year - not to mention this year"s portrayal of the pubic hair of the songwriter Chan Marshall, who performs as Cat Power.
Some of his less controversial but nonetheless deeply insightful New Yorker portraits included those of Saul Bellow, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Toni Morrison, Derek Walcott, John Kerry and Stephen Sondheim. His fashion photos at The New Yorker showed, if possible, even more edge, especially his pictorial essay in the November 1995 fashion issue. It featured a human skeleton carrying on with elegant models.
His own archives also yielded visual treasures for the magazine, including portraits of Audrey Hepburn, W. H. Auden and Rudolf Nureyev"s foot.
Unlike his upbeat and glamorous fashion photography, Mr. Avedon"s portraiture chronicled a growing sense of disillusionment about the possibilities of American life and culture, especially after the photographer"s optimistic years in the 50"s and early 60"s. From the start, his portraits seemed intent on peeling away the bright sheen of celebrity to reveal the ordinary, often insecure human being underneath, but in the 1970"s they became focused on depicting the trials of aging and death.
In 1969 he photographed the antiwar movement, including the Chicago 7 during their raucous conspiracy trial. In 1976, America"s bicentennial year, he photographed 73 men and women in power for Rolling Stone magazine; working with the writer Renata Adler, who helped with the selection of people and photographs, the collection was called "The Family." Between 1978 and 1984 he produced a major body of portraits of people he believed were representative of the current spirit of the American West; his unhappy cast of ex-convicts, drifters, drinkers and others with hard-luck stories led some observers to complain that he had become cynical and misanthropic.
But Mr. Avedon always maintained that his portraits, like his fashion pictures, were simply records of appearances. "My photographs don"t go below the surface," he once said. "They don"t go below anything. They"re readings of what"s on the surface. I have great faith in surfaces. A good one is full of clues."
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Mr. Avedon"s mostly black-and-white photography was featured in a number of books and exhibition catalogues during his lifetime, including "Observations" (1959), with a text by Truman Capote; "Nothing Personal" (1964), with text by James Baldwin; and "Portraits" (1976), with an essay by the art critic Harold Rosenberg. His portraits from the West were published in the 1985 book "In the American West," in conjunction with a traveling exhibition organized by the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth. "An Autobiography," an album of his photographs that he intended as a visual life"s testament, was published by Random House in 1993.
A notorious stickler for precision in his photographic technique, Mr. Avedon long sought to control the organization and layout of his books and exhibitions, believing that the meaning of his images was in large part determined by their contexts, whether on the wall or in reproduction.
This was certainly apparent on the magazine page, where his pictures were characteristically distinctive and elegant. Although as a staff photographer at Harper"s Bazaar (1946-1965) and later at Vogue (1966-1970) he was somewhat at the mercy of the magazine"s fashion editors and art director, his photographs in reproduction virtually jump off the page with a signature brand of visual impact. He sought the same kind of stimulation in his exhibitions, creating prints that depicted their subjects larger than life-size and that towered over the viewer. One image, a group portrait of the denizens of Andy Warhol"s fabled "Factory," was exhibited in a print some 8 feet high and 35 feet wide.
John Szarkowski, a former director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, wrote in 1973 that the importance of Mr. Avedon"s photography "lies in the fact that it constitutes a coherent and challenging composite portrait of many of the mythic figures and spear carriers of the worlds of art, style and high salesmanship."
Richard Avedon was born in New York City on May 15, 1923. His father, Jacob Israel, a second-generation Russian-Jewish immigrant, was the proprietor of Avedon"s Fifth Avenue, a Manhattan clothing store. His mother, Anna Avedon, came fron a family that owned a dress manufacturing business. As a boy, Avedon avidly read fashion magazines and decorated the walls of his room with tear sheets of the fashion photographs he admired.
"One evening my father and I were walking down Fifth Avenue looking at the store windows," he once told Newsweek. "In front of the Plaza Hotel, I saw a bald man with a camera posing a very beautiful woman against a tree. He lifted his head, adjusted her dress a little bit and took some photographs. Later, I saw the picture in Harper"s Bazaar. I didn"t understand why he"d taken her against that tree until I got to Paris a few years later: the tree in front of the Plaza had that same peeling bark you see all over the Champs-Elysees.`"
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Mr. Avedon attended De Witt Clinton High School, where he and James Baldwin were co-editors of The Magpie, the school"s literary magazine. He attended Columbia University for a year and then joined the Merchant Marine, where he was assigned to the photo section. There he learned photography, taking thousands of identification portraits of sailors.
Upon leaving the Merchant Marine in 1944 he sought out Alexey Brodovitch, an influential designer and the art director of Harper"s Bazaar, and enrolled in his class at the New School for Social Research. In what was officially called the Design Laboratory, Mr. Brodovitch offered criticism and encouragement to photographers, graphic designers and illustrators, and on occasion, provided them with paying assignments for the magazine.
Mr. Brodovitch and the 21-year-old Avedon formed an immediate and close bond; in 1945 Mr. Avedon"s photographs began appearing in Junior Bazaar and, a year later, in Bazaar itself. After being placed on the magazine"s payroll, he opened his own studio, which Mr. Brodovitch chose to use as the off-campus home of his Design Laboratory classes into the 1950"s. Mr. Brodovitch gave Mr. Avedon many plum assignments, including the privilege of covering the Paris spring and fall collections, much to the annoyance of the magazine"s veteran staff photographers, including Louise Dahl-Wolfe.
While Carmel Snow, the legendary editor of Harper"s Bazaar, covered the runway shows in Paris, Mr. Avedon had the more daunting task of arranging to photograph the new designer dresses as luxurious, but wearable, objects of desire. In 1954 he took his models to stereotypical French cafes, nighclubs and casinos, surrounding them with dinner-suited escorts. The following year he made fashion history by setting the couture-gowned models in the midst of a circus. The most memorable of those images, "Dovima With Elephants," shows the most famous model of her day in an ankle-length Dior gown, standing in straw and holding the trunk of one elephant with one hand while gesturing toward another.
Mr. Avedon was encouraged by Mr. Brodovitch to break the boundaries of conventional fashion photography, mixing reality and fantasy with surrealist effect, and he soon learned to visualize his pictures in strictly graphic terms. At first he specialized in on-location scenes that included swirls and blurs of motion, in the manner of Munkacsi 10 years earlier. His later adoption of a seamless white studio background for most of his fashion and portrait photography was at least partly inspired by Mr. Brodovitch"s characteristic use of "white space," a means of making the subject seem suspended and weightless on the page. |
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Although Mr. Avedon made several attempts at photographing in the traditional documentary mode, including a number of street scenes taken on trips to Italy in 1946 and 1947 and a grainy series of images of patients at a Louisiana mental hospital in 1963, his significant contribution to photography"s documentary mode rests with his studio portrait style, and especially with his use of neutral white backgrounds. In the studio he could isolate his subjects not only graphically but also psychologically, producing a convincing illusion of a direct confrontation between the person in the picture and the viewer.
Mr. Avedon"s deceptively simple portrait style was capable of a wide emotional range. He used it to glamorize some of the most beautiful women of the 20th century, including the model Dorian Leigh and her sister Suzy Parker, Jean Shrimpton, the actress Anna Magnani, and a young Jacqueline Kennedy on the eve of her husband"s inauguration as president. But he also could make the mighty and powerful seem ill at ease, if not ridiculous. His portrait of President Eisenhower, taken in 1964, made the great general and world leader appear "like a mental defective," the writer Janet Malcolm observed in a 1978 New Yorker essay on Mr. Avedon"s photography. She found his portraits in the main to be "sharp, black, inky, nasty," representing the antithesis of his flattering fashion photographs.
But his portraits of such cultural figures as Ezra Pound, Charles Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe and Allen Ginsberg could be both sympathetic and moving. Clearly siding with the romantic posture of the alienated artist, Mr. Avedon could penetrate the carefully constructed public image of someone like Monroe and present her as an apparently anguished individual caught up in a role that, like a dress cut one size too large, never quite fit.
In the mid-60"s, after Carmel Snow and Alexey Brodovitch had stopped working and at the height of a fashion revolution that featured the miniskirt and a new generation of youthful designers, Mr. Avedon left Harper"s Bazaar for its competitor, Vogue. There he worked with Alexander Liberman, another remarkable Russian 幦igr?art director. Although he was on Vogue"s staff only until the end of that decade, Mr. Avedon continued his association with the magazine, and with Mr. Liberman, for more than 20 years.
In 1962 Eugene Ostroff, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution, offered Mr. Avedon his first museum exhibition. He seized the offer as a chance to experiment with presenting his pictures outside the pages of a book or magazine, insisting on an installation in which his prints overlapped one another and filled every inch of space on the gallery walls, in the style of a collage. The exhibition had an irresistible impact on viewers and proved popular, but the individual pictures tended to be lost in a sea of visual overkill. |
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By the 1970"s Mr. Avedon was becoming increasingly conscious of the recognition of photography in the art world, and of his own place in the artistic traditions of the medium. He served as the editor of the book "Diary of a Century: Photographs by Jacques-Henri Lartigue" (1970), helping to bring greater acclaim to a photographer who has since been recognized as one of the most original camera artists of the last century. In 1974 his searing portrait series of his terminally ill father was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in 1975 a large exhibition of his portraits was presented at the Marlborough Gallery. The two shows catapulted his work into the center of the growing discussion about photography"s power as a contemporary art form.
Two years later a retrospective exhibition of his fashion and portrait photography, "Richard Avedon: Photographs 1947-1977," was organized at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and subsequently traveled to museums in Dallas, Atlanta and Tokyo. In 1980 another retrospective was organized by the University Art Museum in Berkeley. Both exhibitions featured larger-than-life, finely detailed black-and-white prints with the black edges of the negative included as part of the picture.
Mr. Avedon was capable of being profound and succinct in both pictures and words. His definition of a portrait is a model of concision: "A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he"s being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he"s wearing or how he looks." By the same token, his 1977 picture of LouLou de la Falaise tells us all we might wish to know about fashion"s irresistible allure, and his 1969 image of Andy Warhol"s scarred torso tells us more than we might wish to know about the perils of celebrity.
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In 1982 Mr. Avedon produced a playfully inventive series of advertisements for Christian Dior, based on the idea of film stills. Featuring a stock cast of models and actors, the color photographs purported to show scenes from the life of a fictional "Dior family," whose members managed to wear elegant fashions even when wrestling with one another on a couch. While Mr. Avedon photographed with color film for most of his career, he used it primarily for fashion and beauty pictures. The photographs that he valued most and that were exhibited as art in museums were uniformly black and white.
While continuing to maintain a hectic pace of picture-taking at an age when many would have sought retirement, Mr. Avedon also spent his last years reflecting on his considerable archive of photographs and attempting to organize the pictures in a way that would summarize his own life. His long-awaited "Autobiography," published in 1993, turned out to be not the expected verbal explanation of his career, but a visual narrative that mixed old and new pictures, fashion and portraiture, family snapshots and reportage. It included pictures of Mr. Avedon"s father, mother and stepmother; his sister, Louise; his first wife, Dorcas Norwell, a former model whom he divorced; his second wife, Evelyn; their son, John, and their grandchildren.
By the late 90"s, The New Yorker had hired more staff photographers, but Mr. Avedon continued to use the magazine to showcase work he considered special. For an Election Day issue, he roamed America to photograph prominent politicians, ordinary voters and all manner of characters in between.
Mr. Avedon"s photographs are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Minneapolis Art Museum, the National Museum of American History, the Smithsonian Institution, the Amon Carter Museum of Art and many other museums in the United States and abroad. Many are portraits in which the illusion of objectivity is rigorously maintained.
"A portrait is not a likeness," Richard Avedon said at the time of "In the American West."The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth." |
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不知道有哪位仁人君子可以將上面這篇長文翻譯出來，以饗讀友！ |
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