Richard Avedon Biography Quotes 5 Report mistakes

Early Life
Richard Avedon was born in New York City in 1923 and raised in Manhattan, where the city's storefronts, magazines, and theater marquees formed a visual education long before he ever entered a classroom. At DeWitt Clinton High School he edited the literary magazine and became friends with James Baldwin, a relationship that would resurface decades later in one of his most important books. He served in the U.S. Merchant Marine during World War II, working as a photographer in an identification unit. The routine of making thousands of passport-style pictures imprinted on him the power of the neutral backdrop, the frontal pose, and the forensic encounter between camera and subject. After the war he studied with the charismatic art director Alexey Brodovitch at the New School, absorbing an insistence on graphic clarity, rhythm, and the idea that photographs should feel alive on the page.

Training and Harper's Bazaar
Through Brodovitch and magazine editor Carmel Snow, Avedon began contributing to Harper's Bazaar in the mid-1940s. He opened his own studio, shot in the streets and on rooftops, and began traveling to Paris. Rather than positioning models as inert mannequins, he coaxed them into motion. The resulting pages danced: a hem caught in the wind, a turning head, a laugh. Collaborations with models such as Dovima, Suzy Parker, and Sunny Harnett reimagined fashion as theater. The picture later known as "Dovima with Elephants", made in Paris in 1955, combined grace and spectacle in a way that crystallized his early reputation: he could fuse glamour with audacity and still make it look effortless.

Vogue and the Language of Fashion
By the 1960s Avedon had become a defining voice in fashion photography. He moved to Vogue in 1966, where he worked closely with editor-in-chief Diana Vreeland. Their partnership produced editorial narratives that felt cinematic and urbane, pairing elegant surfaces with wit. New faces such as Jean Shrimpton, Twiggy, and Penelope Tree appeared in his frame with a brisk, modern energy. He remained a meticulous studio craftsman, yet he never allowed technique to stiffen the picture. The fashion image, in his hands, was something elastic: a choreography of light and body that captured a broader cultural mood.

Portraiture and the Culture of the 20th Century
Alongside fashion he pursued portraiture with a stark, almost surgical directness. He often set subjects against a white seamless background and photographed them with a large-format camera, eliminating visual distraction and concentrating on gesture, gaze, and the drama of presence. Actors such as Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn, writers like Truman Capote, artists including Andy Warhol, and musicians from Bob Dylan to Janis Joplin all passed before his lens. In 1967 he made vividly colored portraits of The Beatles that became emblematic of the era's psychedelia. He photographed the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, eliciting a surface poise that readers recognized as both immaculate and fragile. He also portrayed political and countercultural figures, among them Allen Ginsberg and the Chicago Seven, making portraits that tracked the tensions of the 1960s and 1970s.

Books, Collaborations, and Design
Avedon was as rigorous about the book and the exhibition as he was about individual pictures. Observations (1959), with text by Truman Capote, was a bold statement of celebrity portraiture as modern art object. Nothing Personal (1964), created with James Baldwin, confronted race, identity, and American mythmaking in a sequence that moved from spectacle to introspection. He worked for years with art director Marvin Israel, whose spare, muscular approach to typography and sequencing deepened the psychological impact of the images. The editing of his projects was exacting; sequence, negative space, and pacing carried as much meaning as any single photograph.

Jacob Israel Avedon and the Intimate Portrait
In the late 1960s and early 1970s he photographed his father during a period of serious illness. The resulting group of pictures, often titled Jacob Israel Avedon, stripped away glamour to confront mortality, filial love, and the act of looking when looking is difficult. For viewers who knew him primarily through fashion, the work was a revelation: the same precision he brought to celebrities could yield devastating candor within a family.

In the American West
From the late 1970s into the mid-1980s, Avedon undertook a commission that would redefine his career. Traveling through the western United States for years, he photographed oil-field workers, drifters, slaughterhouse employees, prospectors, and teenagers at county fairs against his signature white backdrop. Assistant and writer Laura Wilson helped facilitate the project on the ground. Presented first at the Amon Carter Museum in 1985, In the American West drew passionate responses. Admirers praised the empathy and psychological acuity; critics questioned the power dynamics of making monumental portraits of non-celebrities within a high-art context. The debate only reinforced the series's central insight: that the formal rigor of the studio portrait could be brought into direct contact with working lives far from fashion capitals.

Commercial Work and the Moving Image
Avedon's commercial assignments often intersected with culture at large. He made influential campaigns for fashion and beauty houses and directed notable television spots, including the Brooke Shields Calvin Klein jeans commercials that sparked national conversation in the early 1980s. He photographed campaigns for designers such as Gianni Versace, turning the era's supermodels, including Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista, and Christy Turlington, into icons through images that felt both classical and electric. In Hollywood he served as a visual consultant for the musical film Funny Face, where the character played by Fred Astaire drew on elements of his persona; Audrey Hepburn, whom he had photographed with sensitivity and wit, was central to that production.

The New Yorker and Late Work
In 1992 Tina Brown appointed him the first staff photographer in the history of The New Yorker. The magazine became a venue for his political and cultural portraits, ranging from writers and artists to public officials. The assignments were often produced quickly and under pressure, which suited his belief that a portrait is an encounter rather than an arrangement. Late-career books, including comprehensive retrospectives, consolidated fifty years of work and presented an argument about photography's capacity to register personality, performance, and time.

Personal Life
Avedon married the actress Dorcas Nowell, later known as Doe Avedon, in 1944; the marriage ended in divorce. In 1951 he married Evelyn Franklin, with whom he had a son, John, who became a writer. His personal relationships threaded through his professional life: friendships with editors such as Carmel Snow and Diana Vreeland; a crucial apprenticeship with Alexey Brodovitch; collaborations with Marvin Israel; and a lifelong dialogue with writers and artists, including Capote and Baldwin, whose words sharpened the ambitions of his pictures.

Approach and Legacy
Avedon believed that a portrait is as much about the photographer as the sitter. He shaped the session with conversation and silence, with distance and sudden proximity, coaxing small gestures into revelations. The white backdrop, far from neutral, was a stage on which every crease of clothing and shift of weight mattered. In fashion he helped liberate the photograph from formality; in portraiture he treated fame and anonymity with equivalently exacting scrutiny. His influence is visible in editorial design, in museum practice, and in the work of countless photographers who adopt his frontal clarity, his insistence on eye contact, and his belief that style can carry truth.

Death
In 2004, while on assignment for The New Yorker, Avedon suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and died at the age of 81. He had been photographing the American political season, intent on adding another chapter to his exploration of the nation's public faces. The span of his career, Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, The New Yorker; from Dovima to The Beatles to the workers of In the American West, forms a portrait of modern American image-making itself. His pictures remain alive in the culture because they are exact about surfaces and open about mysteries, and because they preserve the charge of an encounter that, in his hands, always mattered.

Our collection contains 5 quotes who is written by Richard, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Deep - Art.

Other people realated to Richard: James A. Baldwin (Author), Donatella Versace (Designer), Annie Leibovitz (Photographer), Anjelica Huston (Actress), Cindy Crawford (Model), Jacques-Henri Lartigue (Photographer), Lauren Hutton (Model), Nastassja Kinski (Actress), Amber Valletta (Model), Isabella Rossellini (Actress)