Photography Collection

The exhibition “Photography 1946-2004” is showing around 200 of Richard Avedon’s photographs: all the way from the early ones of the forties, when he travelled to Rome and Sicily just after World War II and photographed the street scenes there, through the glamorous fashion world of the fifties in Paris, to the more psychological portraits of literati, actors, musicians and artists. A critic from The New Republic once wrote of an exhibition of Avedon’s works: “Avedon puts in too much and pushes too hard. His work goes too many places” – but regardless of quantity or dating, there’s one common denominator – the portrait. Whether Avedon photographed the street entertainer Zazi in the streets of Rome in 1946, Marilyn Monroe in 1957, Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen in 1958, Veruschka in clothes designed by Kimberly in 1967 or the singer Björk in 2004, it is portraits he creates; not reportage, snapshots, fashion photography, but portraits. Thoughtful portraits, frozen elements of a performance, testifying to empathy and shared responsibility. The retrospective character of the exhibition makes this observation not only possible but inevitable: the whole multi-faceted œuvre can be circumscribed by one artistic arc that is about openness and complexity, lies and flattery in the portrait tradition.
Along with Irving Penn, Avedon changed portrait photography in the twentieth century. Penn is the last exponent of the aristocratic concept in photography: he is considerate and attentive in his pictures where Avedon is radical and brutal. Avedon ranges wide and his photographs exhibit a visible duality: they are photographs taken by a strong, complex personality, a photographer who possesses great humanity – and cold-bloodedness. Avedon tries to bring out more facets rather than just to reproduce his sitters from an arbitrary point of view; as when Picasso works for example with the portrait of Gertrude Stein. Like Picasso, Avedon is a co-creator – not just an observer. The photograph is by nature ‘truthful’, but Avedon shows that the photograph can show or reveal much more than the superficial truth. (…)

Avedon started off as a fashion photographer, and with his keen eye he soon transformed the rather static and monotonous fashion photograph into something living and ground-breaking for the period. Inspired by Martin Munkacsi, he found new ways to give expression to the clothes; the models were no longer just clothes-racks, but living people, even personalities. At the age of just 11 Avedon had covered walls and ceiling with pictures he liked, including photographs by Martin Munkacsi. He regularly saw the magazines Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and Vanity Fair, to which his parents subscribed, and it was in one of these magazines that Avedon first got to know about the Hungarian photographer who had revolutionized fashion photography, literally by getting the models to move. This new vitality that movement expressed – unlike the traditional static posing – fascinated Avedon and became important to his photography. Avedon took Munkacsi’s pioneering work further and to the movement he added soul, emotion, strengths and weaknesses. (…)

New York Life
Some of the early photographs in the exhibition New York Life, 1949, were commissioned by the magazine Life, which invited him in 1949 to photograph life in New York for a whole issue of the magazine. He considered this more reportage-oriented job interesting, accepted an advance of $25,000 and went around the various neighbourhoods of the city: Harlem, Central Park, the El stations. With his Rolleiflex he now spent six months taking a wealth of pictures. But when he had to hand in the material to Life he had second thoughts and could not bear to hand over what he himself felt was an infringement of the aesthetic territory of others. He could not see himself in the role of the photojournalist where he ‘stole’ pictures without asking the permission of the subjects. Even less could he submit the material to an editor who, without the necessary ethics and respect, would design a layout with which Avedon would not feel comfortable. The end of the story was that Avedon gave the advance back to Life and kept all his negatives and contact prints. Not until 1992 – more than forty years later – did he take them out and use some of them in his book An Autobiography, which appeared the next year. It is fantastic to view and read these photographs, which are in many ways documentary and point forward to the reportages he created later, for example on New Year’s Eve 1989 at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. But while they are reportage, they are at the same time portraits: the focus is often on one face. Everything else becomes secondary. Avedon filters all that is heavy and dark out of the pictures, and what remains is a focal point. (…)

Paris – the citadel of haute-couture
In 1946 Avedon went to Paris – city of cities and city of fashion. But the war had left its mark, and the image of the city as the hottest centre of haute couture had to be rebuilt. Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue plunged undaunted into post-war fashion. The strategy of the fashion magazines was to perpetuate the glamour from before the war. When Avedon arrived in Paris the models were shown as Art-Deco-inspired statues – static, like beautiful clothes-horses with ‘creations’ on them. But with Avedon’s photographs life and movement were breathed into the models, and thus into the whole experience of the picture. The photograph of the famous model Dovima, posing in sawdust and hay among elephants in an haute-couture creation is revolutionary. The very setting was ground-breaking in 1948. The contrasts in the composition and expression of the picture are sharply pointed up: the elephant skin is raw, wrinkled and rough, and between them the heavy animals have a beautiful woman, slender and straight and smooth-skinned as the Queen of the Nile. Avedon doesn’t only photograph posing models – he creates an image. That makes all the difference. (…)

From non-serious to serious photography
(…) Avedon was there and got it right at just the right moment. There was great interest in Avedon’s photographs, which had graced magazine covers, and for more than twenty years were an important part of the leading international fashion magazines; but the reception of his series In the American West was to be quite different and crucial. If it had not been clear before, it now became clear, even to the more ponderously moving segment of the critical establishment and the institutions, that this was a man with an œuvre and a project that could not be meaningfully separated from the history of art, if one still wanted to have a strong concept of such a thing. From then on the exhibition activity took hold and gathered speed in earnest.

In the American West
It isn’t about the West. I could have done them anywhere in the world. The portraits are about people – all my work is – forget the West. The work is called “In the American West”, not “The American West”. (Isthmus, Feb. 19, 1988, Janus Rhem) Observation as a phenomenon is also the pivot for Avedon in the series In the American West (1980-85), and here his portraiture captures brand new qualities. It is a series of pictures where the complexity is particularly evident: a number of life-size portraits of Americans from the West. Not the glamour of Hollywood or the perpetually sun-drenched types of California, but people who live in the countryside in Texas, in small spots more or less isolated from the surrounding world. (…)
Avedon not only observes these people and photographs them, he is a again a co-creator. He photographs the farm hand, the petty criminal, the waitress, the gas station attendant... outside the milieu of which they are normally a part. In that sense he does a ‘reverse Arnold Newman’: they are all photographed with a neutral, white background, and always in the shade to prevent the sunlight making shadows, highlighting something in particular and determining what the viewer is to focus on in the photograph. Avedon wants flat faces against a white background. There are few props, and the portraits appear both sober and naked. (…) “These were people with an extraordinary appearance. This is a class that had not been described or observed at all. The white background isolates the subject from itself and permits you to explore the geography of the face; the unexplored continents in the human face.” (Denver Post, October 1985)

After the Fact....
Photography has a lot to do with being in the right place at the right time. Richard Avedon was often that, and in several senses. He did not live isolated in the fashion or portrait world, but was quick on the draw when something was happening; in his own way he entered the eye of the hurricane so he could capture with his camera some of the people there who – perhaps involuntarily – were stranded amidst the harsh realities of society. For example he was on the streets of New York that morning in 1963 when the Kennedy assassination was reported; he travelled with his camera to Vietnam in 1971, participated in demonstrations, covered election campaigns – as in 1976, when he was asked by the magazine Rolling Stone to cover America’s bicentennial presidential election. Instead of only photographing the most prominent politicians, he chose to portray the while circle around the political leadership, which resulted in 73 photographs that he called The Family. He had no particular political affinities or relationships of any kind with these people, and control can in general be said to be a code word for his work, so he let these people appear as they themselves wanted. Avedon didn’t choose how they were to pose, what clothes they should wear, etc., but let them present themselves just as they wished.
A quite epoch-making event he participated in was New Year’s Eve 1989 in Berlin. In a series of photographs he registered the whole spectrum of emotions that mixed in with the music and fireworks among the many thousands of people who in that year, 1989, when East Germany opened the borders between the parts of the divided city, celebrated New Year around the Brandenburg Gate. The fall of the Berlin Wall. The demolition had begun just two months before, but there was still so much left of the Wall that this hated landmark was like a magnet for the Berliners themselves and others who had travelled there on this special evening. In the photographs he captured the Wall, the Brandenburg Gate, punks, housewives, young and old, homeless and well-heeled, and the whole of vulnerable mankind unfolded explosively in picture after picture – laughter, tears, shouting, all the emotions were caught by his unerring eye and manifested him as the photographer who was constantly seeking new limits – both on the surface and beneath it.