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| Exhibit showcases Avedon’s portraits of the human soul | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| By Chris Page, Get Out | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| January 10, 2008 | ||||||||||||||||||||||
Click here to view a gallery of more photography by Avedon. For more than a half-century, Avedon redefined not only the art of portraiture but commercial fashion photography too. Long before his death in 2004 at age 81, he had become an American icon. Still, on the eve of a new career retrospective at the Phoenix Art Museum, “Richard Avedon: Photographer of Influence,” what museum director James Ballinger likes to remember most has little to do with pictures. SALT OF THE EARTH He recalls, back in 1986, helping track down a pair of saguaro salt-and-pepper shakers for Avedon, who was in town to supervise an exhibit opening — and looking to add to his collection of kitsch. Years later, stepping into a busy New York restaurant, Ballinger watched as the photographer, happy to run into an old acquaintance, talked the wait staff into whisking out a new table for his friend. “It’s that kind of charm, if you will, that probably allowed him to engage the likes of the people we’re talking about,” Ballinger says. People like Marilyn Monroe, Louis Armstrong and Bob Dylan — and the workaday everybodies who fill Avedon’s gritty “In the American West” series, his best known and most controversial body of work, which the Phoenix Art Museum hosted in ’86 (one of only five museums to do so). The “West” images, which returned to Phoenix a few years ago, are absent from this show. (The iconic entertainers above, though, make appearances.) Instead, curator Rebecca Senf of the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson, says she wanted to focus on 50 or so pieces that explore his larger body of work — including more of his fashion work for magazines including Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. “I was hoping to show a range of his breadth in photography,” Senf, 35, says. ICONIC ICONOCLAST A slight man with what’s been called a “restless, nervous energy,” Avedon’s photographic iconoclasm started early in his career. A Merchant Marine photographer at 19, he started shooting for Harper’s Bazaar and Life only four years later. He took a decidedly nontraditional approach. “He was the first photographer to take models out of the studio,” says Arizona State University photography professor William Jenkins. “Before Avedon, it was very formal, very staged. He took them out onto the streets, into the circus, and photographed them stepping off curbs or leaning in stores, selecting things to buy.” Now, Jenkins says, that’s become utterly common. “There is a whole bunch of commercial photographers whose careers are in making Avedon photographs,” he says. “They’ve aped his style so well.” THE WHITE ALBUM For all of Avedon’s impact on fashion photography (the headline of his obituary in The New York Times called him “the eye of fashion”), Jenkins admits the photographer’s legacy will likely be his portraits — black-and-white figures against a uniformly stark wall of white. There’s an undeniable power in such simplicity. “The white backdrop,” curator Senf says, “is really intended to eliminate contextual distractions. He doesn’t want anything competing with the figure. He wants us to notice things like the expression on the people’s faces, their posture. All of that is the visual.” Whether shooting notables or not, Avedon approached his portraits with a bare intensity. By the late ’60s, his style involved setting up the camera, an 8-by-10-inch large-format view camera, then standing beside it with a shutter cord — meaning he was able to talk to his subjects face-to-face, an intimacy that many say defines his art. He died in San Antonio, Texas, working on a project called “Democracy,” about the 2004 presidential elections; the incomplete project ran later that year in The New Yorker, where he was staff photographer. “I have a white background,” the magazine quoted him as saying. “I have the person I’m interested in and the thing that happens between us.” Senf hopes those who attend the Phoenix Art Museum exhibit will take the time to consider “the thing that happens between” Avedon and his subject — be it Marilyn Monroe or Paul McCartney and John Lennon — and the deeper emotions revealed. “He’s captured this one prescient moment of experience,” she says. “If you can slow down and examine the information he’s revealing to us, there’s an opportunity to have a really powerful connection.” “Richard Avedon: Photographer of Influence” opens Saturday, Jan. 12 and runs through April 13 at the Phoenix Art Museum, 1625 N. Central Ave. Hours: 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays. Admission: $10, $8 for seniors and students, $4 for children, free 3 p.m. to 9 p.m. Tuesdays and 6 p.m. to 10 p.m. first Fridays. (602) 257-1222 or www.phxart.org. Contact Chris Page by email, or phone (480) 898-5656 |
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