Richard Avedon
One of the many arresting
images in The Sixties , Richard Avedon's latest collection of portraits,
is a famous photograph of Andy Warhol. The artist, looking either terrified or
defiant, is peeling back a bandage to reveal the scars left by bullets from
would-be assassin Valerie Solanas' gun. The picture, however many times you've
seen it, retains its creepy power. It also invokes a remarkably complex set of
references, and so might stand as an emblem of the '60s--the decade and the
book--for a number of reasons. Apart from Warhol's own iconic status, his pose
recalls a notorious moment of '60s political theater: Lyndon Johnson's display,
to a press corps as yet unaccustomed to familiarity with the intimate anatomy
of presidents, of his gall-bladder surgery scar, which illustrator David Levine
later rendered as a map of Vietnam. And Avedon's book exposes a number of
scars, both physical and spiritual: the disfigured face of a napalmed
Vietnamese woman, the sores on a leper's fingerless hand, the bent, swollen
nose of a tired, defeated-looking Abbie Hoffman. This was a time that left its
mark on people.
Scars
are not all that's exposed: Flipping through The Sixties you'll catch
glimpses of Warhol superstar Viva's pregnant belly and fashion model
Veruschka's breasts, as well as (among others) dancer Rudolf Nureyev's penis
(impressive, flaccid) and satirist Paul Krassner's (less so, half-erect). And
then there are the bellybuttons: On one page Truman Capote, no longer the
slender, bow-tied manchild Avedon had photographed a decade earlier, pulls open
his dark shirt to show his navel, a winking eye in an expanse of pale flesh. On
the next page the Fugs (Ken Weaver, Ed Sanders, and Tuli Kupferberg) in all
their hairy hippie insouciance, mimic Capote's pose. (The '60s, by the way,
were not an era of ripped abs.) Not that Avedon's omphalic interests have been
confined to the famous. In the American West , his controversial 1985
exhibition at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas (published as a
handsome coffee table volume by Abrams), features the exposed midriffs and
naked torsos of drifters, truck-stop waitresses, and rodeo cowboys. Indeed, the
bellybutton might be an apt metaphor for Avedon's intimate, unsettling work.
People who gaze at their own navels are called narcissists. What do you call
someone who makes his living gazing at other people's? A voyeur? A sadist? A
control freak? Or an artist?
It says a great deal about Richard Avedon, and about the
civilization he has documented for more than half a century, that he has
published a fat volume of pictures of other people and called it An
Autobiography . Photography is a relentlessly objective art, ours is a
relentlessly subjective age, and Avedon has meticulously organized his art
around this paradox. He understands that self-exposure, an organizing principle
of our politics and our culture, is a defense mechanism: The selves we
shamelessly exhibit to the world are screens, and Avedon uses his camera to
penetrate them. He catches Abbie Hoffman acting out for the camera--tongue
protruding, middle finger in the air, "fuck" emblazoned on his forehead--but
when you look at Hoffman's eyes you see no joy, no mirth, no childish glee at
pissing off the grown-ups. You see the calculation behind the anarchic
theatricality of the New Left and also the sheer dread. When you look into the
faces of Rose Kennedy or Henry Kissinger you see souls emptied by the pursuit
of power. In the American West lays open souls crushed by the lack of
it.
Avedon has done much to
revive the portrait as a central genre of photographic art. His only serious
rival is Irving Penn, and his epigones (whether they admit it or not) include
everyone from Robert Mapplethorpe to Annie Leibovitz. Among his precursors are
Julia Margaret Cameron, the great 19 th -century British portraitist,
and August Sander, who set out to compile a comprehensive visual record of
German life between the world wars. But while Avedon's portraits clearly
represent his bid for artistic immortality--a bid he has assiduously devoted
much of the past decade to mounting--they represent only one facet of his work.
Since the mid-1940s, when he went to Paris to capture the revitalization of
French couture--a moment captured in Stanley Donen's 1957 film Funny
Face , for which Avedon served as visual consultant, and in which Fred
Astaire plays a fey, charming photographer named Dick Avery--Avedon has
produced a staggering corpus of fashion and commercial photography. First at
Harper's Bazaar , where he was a protégé of the legendary editor Carmel
Snow and her equally celebrated art director Alexey Brodovitch, and then at
Vogue , to which he defected, for a million-dollar contract, in 1966,
Avedon's covers and spreads defined the frothy, exuberant spirit of American
fashion photography in what will likely be remembered as its golden age. Along
the way, he produced a staggering number of images that have remained lodged in
media memory and adorned generations of dorm-room walls: Dovima and the
elephants, Nastassja Kinski and the snake, Simon and Garfunkel as Gertrude and
Alice (on the cover of their breakthrough album Bookends ), Barbra
Streisand chewing on a daffodil, and Joan Baez blowin' in the wind. If you can
conjure a mental image of Marilyn Monroe, William S. Burroughs, Frank Zappa, or
Marianne Moore, chances are you're thinking of an Avedon photograph.
Avedon's ubiquity, the extraordinary variety of subjects
and styles, and his willingness to shoot album covers, posters, and
advertisements as well as museum-worthy black-bordered prints, have
occasionally offended purists. Hilton Kramer, for instance, called Avedon's
1994 retrospective at the Whitney (which produced a gorgeous book titled
Evidence: 1944-1994 ) "the ultimate capitulation to celebrity, money and
fashion at the expense of art." But celebrity, money, and fashion have been, at
least since the age of the Medicis, part of the ambience in which art is
made--and also one of its favorite subjects. And anyway, to quote John Ashbery,
"What need for purists when the demotic is built to last?" Photography, in
other words, is an inherently compromised art form--populist, ephemeral, and
easy. Anyone can do it.
In sifting through the
profusion of images Avedon has assembled over the years, it's hard to keep the
categories distinct. And this may be the point. "Distinctions between
reportage, portraiture and fashion have always seemed arbitrary," the
photographer told the London Times a few years ago "I'm one of those
photographers who can address a camera towards anything that takes his
interest, and I'm interested in many things." There is remarkable continuity
among Avedon's celebrity portraits, his fashion layouts, and documentary work
such as the pictures of Sicilian street children and Louisiana mental patients
he took in the 1950s. And how would one classify the brilliant hoax Avedon
perpetrated in the pages of Harper's Bazaar in 1962--a series of garish,
hectic, faux-tabloid shots of comedian Mike Nichols and model Suzy Parker
cavorting through Europe? Is it photojournalism? A prank? A happening? A
mess?
The most powerful work in The Sixties also defies
easy categorization. The endlessly reproduced images of that decade tend to
come from television or photojournalism: marchers on the Edmund Pettis Bridge,
children fleeing burning villages, police clubbing demonstrators in the streets
of Chicago. And though Avedon "covered" the civil rights movement, the war in
Vietnam, and the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial, the pictures he took are
deliberately decontextualized. In the American West leaves out the most
striking fact about the West--its landscapes; similarly, the Vietnam pictures
in The Sixties --taken during Avedon's 1971 trip to Saigon--contain no
lush jungles or crowded urban streets, no Hueys or hamlets or rice paddies.
Rather than record the drama of Vietnam, Avedon invited his
subjects--journalists, soldiers, aid workers, activists, and ordinary
Vietnamese--to re-enact it. A picture of three American GIs and two Vietnamese
women, the latter decked out in minidresses, heels, and a whole lot of
hairspray, captures the shame, arrogance, and bizarre innocence of the American
involvement. A few pages later, we see journalist Gloria Emerson with
photographer Denis Cameron and interpreter Nguyen Ngoc Luong staging a movie
still. And then, on the next page, the napalm victim's face stops us dead.
Avedon is often accused of
exploiting and manipulating his subjects, and of course he does. In 1974, he
exhibited a series of deathbed portraits of his father, a New York clothing
retailer, which struck many viewers (including Avedon's son) as an act of
unchecked Oedipal hostility. In Helen Whitney's PBS documentary Richard
Avedon: Darkness and Light , he is confronted by Sandra Bennet, who was 12
when he put her on the cover of In the American West in a halter top and
denim overalls. She politely tells him of her self-consciousness and discomfort
at seeing the picture, and he explains to her that, while the photographer and
his model are in some ways collaborators, the power, the control, ultimately
belongs to the photographer alone.
At the end of Whitney's film, Avedon is heard musing
on his relationship to Judaism, a religion that regards graven images as
sinful. While he denies that he has ever been observant, Avedon confesses to
vague spiritual leanings. His most recent work, a portfolio in The New
Yorker (which hired him in 1992 as its first staff photographer) is called
"Revelations," and it consists of pictures of Indian pilgrims, Buddhist lamas,
Catholic priests, and other believers. But these photographs, seen against the
backdrop of Avedon's protean career, seem strangely cold and disembodied. His
is, in the end, a thoroughly secular imagination. The metaphysical confidence
of the sincerely religious gives him nothing to work with--no secrets to
unveil, no narcissism to refract. For Avedon, the camera is the true agent of
immortality, which his subjects accept on his terms: at the cost of their
souls. Avedon is Mephistopheles with a camera--an exemplary modern artist.
