Richard Avedon’s Supersized Camera

“Richard Avedon: Murals” could have been smuggled into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, snuck past the watchful eyes of pharaohs. On view through October 1, “Murals” is an immersion in the years 1969-71, a period of war abroad and revolution in America. Timed to mark the centennial of Avedon’s birth, the showstoppers are his group portraits, which attain the scale of monumental medieval tapestry.Born at New York City, Avedon worked on his high school paper with James Baldwin and excelled as a fashion photographer in the 1940s, serving as the chief photographer for Harper’s Bazaar. The actress Brooke Shields was a frequent subject and muse, and Avedon would become the first staff photographer at the New Yorker. Among those who sat at his studio were General Eisenhower, Marilyn Monroe, Ezra Pound, and Buster Keaton.“Murals” captures a turn in Avedon’s career that was achieved via a change in tools. Out was the handheld Rolleiflex, swapped for a stationary 8×10 Deardorff on a tripod. The roving eye of the fashion photographer becomes a fixed point. The subjects are starkly lit, almost overexposed, and set against a white background. They are stripped down, silver gelatin developed in a dark room whose effect is a blinding contrast of black and white. The size of the murals and the cramped confines of the second-floor gallery force a kind of face-off between the murals that syncs with their historical antagonism of sensibility. “The Mission Council,” which stands 9 15/16 × 39 1/2 inches and was shot at Saigon in 1971, captures the general, ambassadors, and policy hands who ran the war in Vietnam. A void marks the place where the CIA station chief, Ted Shackley, known as the “Blond Ghost,” was meant to stand. Avendon cut his teeth as a photographer in the Merchant Marine, and there is a no-nonsense feel to the mural. Men like Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker and General Creighton Abrams, who helmed the United States Military Assistance Command, stand stiffly and stare straight ahead. Avedon remarked that the worthies “lined up like high school boys.” Avedon had come a long way from shooting Barbra Streisand and Catherine Deneuve.Opposite the “Mission Council” is a mural from two years before and a world away, “Andy Warhol and Members of the Factory.” Warhol’s studio, then at 33 Union Square West, had become a headquarters of the avant garde, a place to party and make his silkscreens and lithographs, surrounded by the motley crew he called his “superstars.” The year before Avedon’s picture, Warhol was shot in the stomach by a radical feminist, Valerie Solanas.Unlike the rush job at Saigon, “Members” was shot over weeks at the Factory. Instead of military garb and suits, some of its subjects are displayed fully nude, while Warhol wears his signature leather. Of particular note is Candy Darling, a transgender muse of the Velvet Underground who starred in two Warhol films. She would die of lymphoma five years after this picture, just 29 years old. Shot twice is Joe Dallesandro, sex symbol of the underground.A more intimate study is of Jean Genet, a radical writer and activist who allied with the Black Panthers and spent six months living in a Palestinian Arab refugee camp, reconnoitering with Yasser Arafat at Amman. Here, Genet wears a weather leather jacket that was a gift from the Black Panthers. Just visible at the edge of the frame is Elbert Howard, the group’s president, suggesting radical chic in action. There are other less monumental pleasures on view. “Marian Anderson, contralto,” from 1955, captures the singer midsong, mouth open and eyes closed in the transport of performance. Anderson was the first Black singer with the Metropolitan Opera, and the photo’s silence offers its own kind of music. “Richard Avedon, reporter” is a self-portrait that haunts, as the man accustomed to standing behind the camera is pinned by its lens. One final photograph is a group shot, at Saigon, of the photojournalist Denis Cameron, a New York Times correspondent, Gloria Emerson, and an interpreter, Nguyen Ngoc Luong. The reporter and the interpreter share a cigarette, their huddle captured by Avedon with the frozen elegance that could mark them as denizens of 15th century Florence, not visitors to 21st century Vietnam. Correction: Merchant Marine is the name of the organization of which Richard Avedon was a member. The name was misspelled in an earlier addition.

Richard Avedon’s Supersized Camera

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