Final Days To See Richard Avedon’s Photographs Through a Contemporary Lens

The Gagosian Gallery’s extension of its exhibition “Avedon 100” through July 7 due to popular demand brings into focus the searing and abiding relevance of a great photographer’s camera. Devotees of art and popular culture are urged to see it before it is too late. The show’s star, Richard Avedon, approached photography with playful curiosity. “I follow my enthusiasm,” he told the television host Charlie Rose in an interview in 1993, where he described his work as being “full of vitality and life” and not “burdened by establishment.” Avedon, who never went to art school, told Mr. Rose that he once taped a negative to his upper arm, went to the beach, and sat in the sun. When he peeled the negative off the next day, the image was imprinted on his skin. He intuited that he “was a photographer, before I even knew I was going to be a photographer.” Before Avedon died in 2004, his storied career “helped define America’s image of style, beauty and culture for the last half century,” as the New York Times obituary expressed poignantly. Avedon is seemingly everywhere these days. In addition to this show, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is celebrating the centenary of his birth by showing two of his four monumental murals. The exhibition features more than 200 photographs in an eclectic retrospective. A senior director at Gagosian, Kara Vander Weg, tells the Sun that the “premise was to ask 158 people to choose their favorite Avedon photograph and that would be what we would put in the show.” She adds: “We intended to have a wide selection of people to show how influential Avedon still is today.”The selectors include the singer Elton John, the television personality Kim Kardashian, the model Kate Moss, and the director Spike Lee. Each contributor was asked to write a brief text as to why they picked the photographs. These personal statements along with the images have been reproduced in a new book, published by Gagosian and distributed by Rizzoli. Ms. Vander Weg, who was also one of the selectors, chose “New York Life #8, Harlem, September 6, 1949,” a picture from a series commissioned by Life magazine. “I like seeing New York in a different time that still feels like New York today,” Ms. Vander Weg reflects. Richard Avedon, ‘Michael Jordan,’ Athlete, New York, September 22, 1988. Courtesy of the Avedon FoundationIn “New York Life #8,” the man in the far right corner, leaning into a posture of exhaustion, is contrasted with a child, bouncing up the steps with a lollipop in his mouth. Ms. Vander Weg explains: “The kid is impervious to the man. The image shows you what it takes to survive in New York.”Avedon didn’t show this photograph to the public for nearly 50 years. Ms. Vander Weg elucidates: “Around the time of his Whitney exhibition in 1994, he looked at this material and decided that he liked it more than he did in 1948.” In 1948, Life magazine assigned an entire issue to a then-25-year-old Avedon on the subject of New York City Avedon, though, declined to finish the project and returned the check. The enthusiastic photographer preferred a world where he could create, invent, and play with imagery rather than capturing the reality posing on the streets: the fashion world. One of the most famous fashion images of the 20th century, produced for Harper’s Bazaar and included in the current show, is “Dovima with Elephants, Evening Dress by Dior, Cirque d’Hiver, Paris, 1955.” It depicts Avedon’s favorite model at the time, Dorothy Juba, known as Dovima, wearing a Dior dress next to two circus elephants. Richard Avedon, ‘Dovima With Elephants Evening,’ Evening Dress by Dior. Cirque d’Hiver, Paris, August 1955. Courtesy of the Avedon Foundation.Despite the image finding critical acclaim, Avedon felt the picture was a “failure” because “the sash was blowing to the left,” offsetting the composition. That didn’t seem to bother a young fashion designer named Gianni Versaci, who saw the photograph in a magazine in Italy and decided, “One day I will work with him.” For almost two decades, between 1979 and 1998, Avedon collaborated with Gianni and Donatella Versace, electrifying fashion photography with dozens of campaigns. Many of these memorable images are featured here. They disclose Avedon’s refined sense for movement and theatrics. Avedon maintained, as he put it in the documentary “Darkness and Light,” that fashion “is one of the richest expressions of human desires, ambitions, needs, frailty, insecurity, security. What we wear is an indication of a sense of ourselves.” He added: “Fashion has been in all art history, look at the Velazquezs, look at the Goyas.” There isn’t an important American figure of the 20th century whom Avedon did not catch with his shutter. The jazz musician Chet Baker stirs emotions against Avedon’s signature white backdrop. Avedon’s grandson Michael selected the jazz legend, quoting his grandfather to the effect that, “All photographs are accurate, none are the truth.” One wishes, though, these personal statements were made available in the exhibition itself. Visitors are told who selected the photograph, not what they wrote about it. For that, they must purchase an accompanying book. The author James Baldwin’s nephew, Trevor Baldwin, chose a photograph of the boxer Joe Louis’s hand, stating that “looking at the unbruised knuckles conjures a different kind of strength forced to collide with a unique period of time.” Thanks to the director Spike Lee, we can see civil rights leader Malcom X hanging next to a striking portrait of William Casbey, one of the last living Americans born into slavery. A portrait of basketball legend Michael Jordan, taken for Gentleman’s Quarterly magazine in 1989, is captivating. An editor at that magazine, Will Welch, discloses that Avedon wrote Mr. Jordan’s name on his hand, “so he could remember who he was photographing.” Avedon’s uncompromising enthusiasm continues to emanate from his pictures. “Now with Instagram, it’s really hard to get excited about photography,” one visitor interviewed by this correspondent commented. “Here,” he added, “you feel his energy. It makes a difference to see the work in print.”

Final Days To See Richard Avedon’s Photographs Through a Contemporary Lens

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