The Avedon photograph—or, more broadly, the Avedon photographic style—has by now become a lively contribution to the visual poetry of sophisticated urban life. Nearly everybody is familiar with it, for it has long since overflowed the pages of Harper’s Bazaar and influenced the advertising in most of the slick-paper periodicals. It has been imitated by other photographers, but the imitations have seldom approached the animation of the originals; in any case, as soon as the imitators have mastered at least the surface elements of one of Avedon’s innovations, he has always popped up with some entirely new departure, for he has never been one to stand still. The world he depicts is an artificial one; his polished and rather romantic art flatly contradicts the bromide that the camera never lies. Avedon’s camera unquestionably lies, but it does so in such a poetic and ingratiating manner that the photographic fiction it produces has become a sort of folklore of the world in which fashionable elegance counts. The characters in this fiction are women of unbelievable beauty and grace, moving about in an environment that exists largely in the imagination. This is a composite of mists, glowing lights, the moods of nocturnal revellers, nostalgic memories of bars and gaming tables and theatres, and such ephemeral minutiae as the feeling of enchantment at the sight of a taxi in the rain whose door is opened to receive a suave and mysterious beauty, or the moment of gaiety when some lovely girl decides to throw dignity aside, or the magical second in which the casual motions of a beautiful woman are observed secretly across a restaurant table—all fragments of a metropolitan fairyland, glimpsed by ordinary mortals only at times of heightened illusion.
Technically, Avedon’s work shows little reverence for the ideals of sharpness and accuracy that are still the goal of most commercial photographers. Not being concerned with realism, Avedon sometimes deliberately reproduces the imperfections of elementary photography in order to create pictures that have an unrehearsed and improvised—almost accidental—air about them. His camera often invades a penumbral region in which the blur—for years regarded by professionals as the mark of the bungler—is used as a means of poetic evocation. His control of various kinds of blur—blurred backgrounds, blurred lighting, blurred movement by the model—has added a new dimension to what used to be an extremely literal art. The Avedon blur has, in fact, become a sort of colophon. He is not the only photographer who has intentionally produced the fuzzy effects that are the continual humiliation of the amateur, but he has been more consistent and resourceful than most. As might be imagined, the Avedon blur calls for a lot more ingenuity and technical mastery than are required for pictures that are merely clear, since it involves, among other things, determining just how much blurriness is desirable for the job at hand, and then capturing precisely that amount on the negative, working out contrasts between blurriness and sharpness in a single picture, and deciding intuitively when to blur and when not to blur.
For not all Avedon photographs are blurred, nor can blurriness even be said to be the basis of his craftsmanship. In many of his pictures, everything has been eliminated but the model, who stands out in sharp outline against an absolutely blank white background; moreover, his portraits are notable for an almost microscopic delineation of human character that reveals a stark concentration on personality. The key to Avedon’s art is to be found not in his technical devices, which he invents and discards with restless rapidity, but in his preoccupation with the looks, mannerisms, and gestures of human beings, whom he appears to regard as actors performing in dramas of his own invention. In fashion photography, the human beings are, of course, beautiful women, and as seen through his camera lens they actually do take on the semblance of leading ladies on the stage. They may, in passing, also make the clothes they are wearing seem desirable, but what principally attracts the eye is the spirited way they seem to be participating in a psychological situation. The woman inside the clothes may look joyous, wistful, lonely, arrogant, bored, expectant, surprised, annoyed—she may even weep, though weeping models have not been particularly popular with the editors of Harper’s Bazaar—but in no case does her display of emotion betray any sign of affectation. On the contrary, she invariably seems to have been caught unawares by the camera at some evanescent moment, and everything about her expression and bearing suggests a drama beginning long before and concluding long after the click of the shutter. It is this power to induce the conviction that one is witnessing a crucial instant in the emotional life of the subject, and to stimulate curiosity as to what brought it about and what will ensue, that gives the Avedon photograph its peculiar distinction—that of being not so much a picture of a well-dressed beautiful woman as a revelatory glimpse of a feminine psyche confronted with a situation involving action or passion.
Any inquiry into the nature of Avedon’s singular talent as a photographic dramatist leads, naturally, beyond the sphere of mere dexterity with a camera to a consideration of the photographer’s own personality. So slim (five feet seven and a half; a hundred and twenty-five pounds) as to give a deceptive appearance of fragility, he is a rather handsome, black-haired, dark-eyed, and, at thirty-five, still boyish-looking man—fastidious, but with no trace of self-consciousness in his manner, and endowed with an acute sensitivity to his surroundings and the people in them. Toward women—especially toward those who happen to be his models—he is courtly and attentive, and his understanding of their potentialities and foibles is comparable to that of a veteran casting director. When the model pleases him, he is so laudatory that she may well come to believe she is the embodiment of his ideal of a leading lady. In his studio—a surgically tidy suite of seven rooms on the top floor of a two-story taxpayer on East Forty-ninth Street, adjoining Manny Wolf’s Chop House—he usually works in his shirtsleeves and a pair of tight-fitting Edwardian slacks, hopping about like an undergraduate stage manager and bossing a staff of half a dozen secretaries and laboratory assistants without ever losing his temper or using an even remotely dictatorial tone. The studio is constantly throbbing with activity—props being constructed, whole stage sets being erected, complex lighting systems being laid out—and the transient fauna on the premises may include not only the models but a flock of doves or a pack of greyhounds. One cold day last winter, a portable swimming pool was installed in the place, from which a young lady emerged, dripping, to face the camera for a series of bathing-cap shots while Avedon thoughtfully provided her with restorative draughts of brandy.
No matter how frenzied the bustle, though, Avedon is never too hurried to spend half an hour (at a cost to him of perhaps sixty dollars in model’s fees) sitting serenely with a distressed model on a couch in the studio, discussing whatever it is that is troubling her. A model is likely to arise from one of Avedon’s cultivated pep talks with the idea that she really is lovely, and that, instead of merely posing, she is gloriously holding the center of an imaginary stage, free to act as her own dramatic impulses dictate. In this frame of mind she will very probably reveal the instinctive individual charm that may be expected of any beautiful girl when given her head in an aura of masculine admiration. When, presently, she finds herself facing the camera, the theatrical atmosphere is heightened not only by Avedon’s cries of delight and his occasional bantering comments, which are designed to bring about changes of mood and expression, but also by a nearby hi-fi set, playing music carefully tailored to the model’s personality and preferences. This musical accompaniment is important. Suzy Parker, Avedon’s current favorite model, for example, gets a big lift from listening to Lena Horne and to “Witchcraft” as sung by Frank Sinatra. “She needs this sort of thing,” Avedon explains. “One kind of music or another brings out the best in all of them.”
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As a leading prophet of the mystique of the elegant and beautiful woman, Avedon has achieved considerable worldly success—to the extent of something like a quarter of a million dollars a year. Since, even today, Harper’s Bazaar pays him only a few hundred dollars for a full-page picture, it is plain that most of his income is der
ived from other sources. These are the numerous arrangements he has with advertisers, under which he celebrates such disparate products as Revlon lipstick and Pabst beer. He seldom permits his name to be used in connection with his advertising work, and he takes great care to distinguish between it and what he calls his “creative” work, which, since 1945, has appeared almost exclusively in Harper’s Bazaar, and always with a credit line. Avedon’s rise to eminence in his profession has been more in the nature of suddenly and effortlessly attaining a plateau than of painfully climbing to a peak of success, for he arrived pretty much where he is today when he was only twenty-two. He was born on May 15, 1923, in Manhattan, the descendant of a Jewish family that had migrated here from Russia two generations before. His father, who for many years was co-owner of a women’s-wear department store called Avedon’s Fifth Avenue, had a strong regard for the practical, and was determined to make his son appreciate the importance of being economically independent, a theme that he emphasized by repeated admonitions that if young Richard didn’t look out, he would join the army of illiterates and end up as a taxi-driver. To impress him further with the value of money, he gave the boy a weekly allowance of five cents, in pennies, payable on presentation of a budget allocating every cent of it. When Richard was twelve, or thereabouts, his father illustrated a lecture on the perils of drink by giving him a bottle of wine, which the youngster immediately polished off and which induced, first, a spirited impersonation of Fred Astaire and, later, a monumental hangover. To the best of Avedon’s recollection, he was seventeen when he left home, determined to make his way by himself and not wind up as a taxi-driver. Simultaneously, he quit De Witt Clinton High School, without graduating; except for some extension courses in literature at Columbia later on, that was the end of his formal education.
The plateau came in sight when Avedon got his first job—as an errand boy for a small photographic concern at Fifty-seventh Street and Sixth Avenue—but he did not recognize it, for his ambition just then was to become a poet. He reverently studied the works of Sandburg, Yeats, Jeffers, MacLeish, and T. S. Eliot, and wrote a great many poems himself, some of which were published in the Journal-American and in H. I. Phillips’ column in the New York Sun, bringing him both a modicum of fame and—at twenty-five cents a line—an addition to his income. His published works show a certain tendency toward repetition. Having made Phillips’ column with the couplet
City snow, like sodden cotton,
Is obviously good for notton,
Avedon, not a man to waste a poetic image, a few months later used it again in this quatrain:
Summer heat, like sodden cotton,
Is obviously good for notton,
And being quite candid,
I just can’t standid.
The cause of poetry was set back by the Second World War, because in 1942 Avedon enlisted in the Merchant Marine.
During the days when his father was interested in women’s wear, Avedon had often found copies of fashion magazines lying about the house, and had even kept a scrapbook of photographs from them that he liked. At the time, he had not the slightest idea that he might someday become a photographer himself, but he was an admirer of good fashion and theatre photography, and of the pictures by Cecil Beaton, Edward Steichen, Martin Munkacsi, and Anton Bruehl that were then appearing in Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and Vanity Fair. When he enlisted in the Merchant Marine, his father gave him a Rolleiflex camera as a going-away present, and, almost haphazardly, Avedon applied for a job in the service’s photography branch, perhaps feeling that as long as he had a camera, he might as well go in for photography. He was assigned to a group that spent most of its time on land, at Sheepshead Bay, and though he went briefly to sea a couple of times to take pictures of wrecks, most of his work consisted in turning out identification photographs of Merchant Marine personnel. On the side, and in his spare moments, he amused himself by making pictures of a more ambitious sort, some of which contained the first traces of the Avedon blur. One of these was a portrait of two brothers; the brother in the foreground was in sharp detail, and the brother in the background was out of focus, merely a suggestion of a looming presence. Avedon’s extracurricular blurry photographs were, of course, of no interest to the Merchant Marine, but he saw something in them that excited him, and in 1944, as soon as he was demobilized, he presented himself at Bonwit Teller, still in uniform, and asked to be allowed to photograph some clothes free of charge. Fashion photography at the time was by no means a difficult field to break into. Apart from a few star performers like Louise Dahl-Wolfe, George Hoyningen-Huene, and Toni Frissell, it was peopled by some of the most commonplace hacks to be found in the photographic profession. Avedon was, and is, voluble and persuasive. He was given some clothes by the store, and, hiring Bijou Barrington (then the most expensive model in New York) with money he had saved from his Merchant Marine pay, he photographed them—unblurred. Bonwit liked the pictures, put them up in the store elevators, and gave him some other jobs. A year later, Avedon made up a portfolio of his best Bonwit work, added his Merchant Marine brothers for luck, and went around to Harper’s Bazaar. At the time, the magazine’s art director was Alexey Brodovitch, a dedicated romantic, a balletomane, and himself a dabbler in fanciful, poetically misty photography. He riffled through Avedon’s fashion shots, discarded them, and picked up the two brothers. That one interested him; he liked the blur. Accordingly, Avedon was hired, despite certain initial misgivings that Brodovitch had about the young man’s prowess as a technician, and assigned, in the beginning, to the section of the magazine known as Junior Bazaar. “His first photographs for us were technically very bad,” Brodovitch recalls. “But they were not snapshots. It has always been the shock-surprise element in his work that makes it something special. He has an amazing capacity for spotting the unusual and exciting qualities in each subject he photographs. Those first pictures of his had freshness and individuality, and they showed enthusiasm and a willingness to take chances.” Before long, the chances that Avedon took as an upstart photographer—and the graver chances that Brodovitch took in publishing his pictures—started paying off. In the thirteen years that Avedon has been at Harper’s Bazaar, working most of the time under Brodovitch’s benign and exquisitely perceptive eye, he has been permitted the full exercise of his imaginative talent, even—or perhaps especially—when that talent has led him far from the conventions of fashion-magazine photography. He has found Harper’s Bazaar a gallery in which to exhibit his most distinctive, not to say his most eccentric, gifts, and, notwithstanding the relatively trifling effect nowadays of its payments on his bank account, he still looks upon it as an unequalled showcase for an aspirant to artistic prestige.
A sense of this high-fashion prestige also affects that peculiar world inhabited by photographers’ models. The legion of photogenic beauties who make a living for the most part by ornamenting ads for soap and refrigerators regard an appearance in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar or Vogue much as a singer regards an appearance at the Metropolitan Opera House. These magazines do not pay the models they hire anything like what can be earned in the advertising business. But they bestow on them a standing that is dearer than gold and that has the practical advantage of enhancing their market value no end in the profane environs of Madison Avenue, where, like Avedon, they make their financial killings. To become a Harper’s Bazaar or Vogue fashion model is to reach the peak of a crowded and highly competitive profession, a peak from which various promised lands—the theatre, the movies, marriage to a polo player—may be more or less confidently contemplated. The situation is one that has made Avedon a great power in the modelling business.
In justice to Avedon, it should be said that he exercises his power with becoming humility and concern for the standards of his profession. Although he can make a model the toast of the advertising business almost overnight—and has, in fact, repeatedly done so—his motives on such occasions have been predominantly aesthetic and have always reflected the exigencie
s of his approach to photography. He chooses his models not only for their beauty but for certain dramatic qualities of personality that he recognizes as suited to his particular theatrical needs. Now and then, he has detected just the right combination after only the briefest encounter with a stranger in some public place; he made one such discovery among the passengers in an elevator at De Pinna, and another while getting out of a cab in the East Fifties. But this doesn’t happen often. As a rule, Avedon selects his leading ladies from the ranks of established professionals. Once he has become interested in a girl, he sticks to her with the fidelity of a reigning diva’s impresario—applauding her triumphs, developing her most striking characteristics, and observing by the hour her personality quirks and her mannerisms, both when she is moving about and when she is in repose. Avedon, of course, has no lien on the services of a particular model; she can be hired by any photographer willing to pay her fee. Furthermore, in any given period of time he is likely to work with several models. But there is always one who, in his mind, is “his” model—the one on whom his creative thinking is centered, and on whom he can depend for complete projection of his ideas. Naturally, these girls change—in fashion, constancy is death—but Avedon tends to remain faithful to each one for a long time; when he finally feels obliged to let her go, he suffers intense pangs of regret. Several years ago, he felt so unhappy after dismissing a model that he continued to photograph her, trying to catch the sad, wistful essence of a woman forsaken in love. The mood was quite real, since there was little possibility that the model would ever again achieve the renown she had enjoyed while working for Avedon. But the photographs were not all he had hoped they might be, and in the end, with a sigh, he gave up.
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