Book Review Richard Avedon - An Autobiography

Originally appeared in Camera & Darkroom Magazine, 1994

There are writers who can capture the essence of a person, or a personality, in a single paragraph. Some can do it in a few sentences. There is a genius to this, one that the reader can almost always recognize.

There is a style of photography which has the same effect. In one slice of time, a single unguarded moment, we can tell as much, or more, about the person as if we had an entire album to view.

Richard Avedons images are like this. Carefully conceived, meticulously controlled, precisely executed slices of time which tell us more about the subjects and the time in which they live than volumes of photographs by others.

Viewing any collection of Avedons work, even his most recent images made in 1992 and 1993, one can see the flow of our vanity. With the unerring eye of the hawk, Avedon has looked down upon our society, seen the heights and the depths, recording it for posterity. He possesses a sense of the times in which he has lived, and his sense moves, flows, adapts. Subjects are interpreted through his knowledge of humanity and the social climate, then recorded by his lens, in a manner which strips away pretense, cutting through to the fiber of our existence. We view his images of politicians, models, musicians, actors, everyday people, as archetypes of the larger pool of humanity - a pool in which we ourselves are included.

Richard Avedon - An Autobiography, published by Random House, is a major work, a testament to one of the most influential photographers of the second half of this Century. It is a visual tour de force, defining the man and his times.

In Avedon's own words, "The book is about three illusions. The First Illusion being the Illusion of Youth - happiness, hilarity, journey to panic. The second, the Illusion of Power, in the middle of your life when you feel, 'I have achieved this, I have done this, this is going to make me safe. I'm a Father, a wage earner...' And the Third Illusion is the Loss of All Illusions.

"All the themes are established in the First Section. Those themes are developed in Section Two, and recapitulated in Section Three, to reveal the depth and distance those early themes go. So, when you look at this book you'll find that what is in the First Section is in the Second and the Third, but reveals itself in different disguises. Sometimes it's very easy. You'll see I did a production of 'Alice In Wonderland.' It goes all the way through the First Section, Second, Third. In the end it is Alice and the White Knight fighting each other - war between men and women - war of all kinds.

"My Father, in the photographs I did the last seven years of his life, until a few days before he died, goes into each section until the very end. Fashion, which appears throughout the book, appears as a death image in the end.

"Certain people appear in a mental institution. In the First Section you don't even know it's a mental institution - it's just two people sitting on a bench holding hands. Eventually, you begin to see that around us is the mental institution, around us is Alice in Wonderland, around us is the Death of Fathers and the Beauty of Youth."

Perhaps more than any other, Richard Avedon helped define our perceptions of ourselves in the 1950's and 1960's. In the pages of Harpers' Bazaar and later Vogue, he held a mirror to the Western World, showing us how we lived, how we played, and how we dressed (or should, if we did not.) It did not matter if you read either of these magazines. In the days before women's lib, and even today in its wake, enough women read and were influenced by them, to make a major difference in our lives.

"I grew up in a house full of women. I saw their relationship to the way they looked, to clothes, to beauty, and how complicated that was - how anxiety ridden. As a photographer, whenever I could, I would break through and show not just a dress, but what it meant to be wearing a dress. I know what dressing meant to my sister, my cousin, and my Mother. It has always been a deep, deep, subject for me."

Although there are two images of his mother and younger sister made in 1932, when Richard was nine, the book is really a compilation of the last fifty years of his work. The images are not arranged chronologically. Images made in 1972 appear with images made in 1992. They are arranged to tell a story, a life's story.

"I have one book called "In the American West" - another about the Civil Rights Movement. These are real people in the real world that I have lived in, confronting real issues. On the other hand, there are subjective concerns, my feelings about life, which simultaneously confronts many of the issues of the last half of the Twentieth Century.

"Coming towards the end of a life, you want to sum it all up. One of the limitations of photography is a photograph can be a word, it can be a sentence, it can be a paragraph, it cannot be a book. The picture is limited in the way a sentence is not. I could not do a book like this until I had completed photographing every day of my life, which I have done, almost. Then finally there was enough work.

I thought, 'Now maybe I can organize an autobiography, but I don't want to write it, because my real power is in the image, not in the sentence.' I started to organize it as visual prose."

The most recent images, made in 1992, are as vital and revealing of our time and mores as those made at the height of the Sixties and the sexual revolution. "What happens when you get older, is that you know much more. Everything is still there but there is a diminishing and you begin to rely on your wits. If I had known and trusted my Power as a young man, I would have gone even further, even wilder, followed those feelings more recklessly than I did. When feeling leaves it doesn't mean you're going to do worse work...I have more skills, and knowledge - I've learned so much."

There are those who think of Richard Avedon primarily as a fashion photographer. This belies his genius. Richard Avedon's significance is first and foremost as a portrait photographer, with fashion as one of his subjects, albeit the one that is most often seen, and through which he has made his living. In his portraits he tries, and often succeeds, in revealing the inner nature of his subject. In doing so he more often reveals the inner nature of the viewer.

"I have so many thoughts about people, about photographing them, about what their characters are like, I do it without even thinking. It's kind of a gift of feeling what someone is really about, or what I think they're about, or what I need to say they're about.

"My camera and I together, we have the power to confer or take away. And now, when I see my work in a museum, the photographs seem to have little to do with me, they have a life of their own. They have confrontations with their viewers, and I, who was the photographer, become just another viewer."

With a price tag of $100.00 it is not a minor investment, though, with an incredible 284 reproductions, it could easily have been more. "I wanted (this book) to be the best I could do. It's a heavy book, there are a lot of pages. The publisher wanted to charge $150.00. I kept saying, 'Look, there are nine more books coming out, lose money on this one, sell it for a hundred dollars, that's a lot! Students can't afford that!' So I was fighting to give this book away. Let them make money on a book called 'The Sixties' with all the naked Rock Groups undressed. That's fun and fine, and it's going to be a very interesting book, but this is my deepest book."

With only two pages of text, written by Avedon, in oversized type, this book is heavy reading - visual reading. Each image builds upon the next and then the next. Turning the pages, one-by-one, develops a sense of knowing, a sense of being there.

We are confronted by the subjects in ways that cannot be lightly dismissed. Through their eyes and body language we see reflected our own dreams, vanities, and loss of illusion. We see unblinking depictions of life, vitality and death, as only the camera can record them. This is the significance of the book, Richard Avedon: An Autobiography.

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