Another giant of photography dies at 81. He was on assignment at the time. I like that.

Richard Avedon, the Eye of Fashion, Dies at 81

Richard Avedon, whose fashion and portrait photographs helped define America's image of style, beauty and culture for the last half-century, died yesterday in a hospital in San Antonio. He was 81 and lived in Manhattan. The cause was complications of a cerebral hemorrhage suffered last Saturday, said his son, John. Mr. Avedon was in Texas on assignment for The New Yorker magazine, which hired him in 1992 as its first staff photographer. He had been working on a portfolio called "Democracy,'' an election-year project that included coverage of the presidential nominating conventions. Mr. Avedon's photographs captured the freedom, excitement and energy of fashion as it entered an era of transformation and popularization. No matter what the prevailing style, his camera eye always found a way to dramatize its spirit as the fashion world's creative attention swayed variously from the "New Look" of liberated Paris to pragmatic American sportswear designed in New York, and from the anti-establishment fashion of London's Carnaby Street to sophisticated, tailored dresses and suits from Milan.

[more]

The above New York Times obiturary had a couple of Avedon quotes on portraits that struck me:

"A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he's being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he's wearing or how he looks." "A portrait is not a likeness," Richard Avedon said at the time of "In the American West. "The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth."

"All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth." Something anyone taking or looking at a photograph should remember.

richardavedon.com

  thanks to Marja-Leena Rathje

Richard Avedon: Portraits

  thanks to Marja-Leena Rathje

This is another post from the Street Photography mailing list. Luis's post said it very well. Here it is in its entirety:

An era passes, and vacancies created for those still alive who would dare take the medium forward. We stand on the shoulders of giants, and the only way ever to repay that debt is to dream large and reach beyond our horizons. My favorite Avedon story is from his book "Observations" : "My first sitter was Rachmaninoff. He had an apartment in the building where my grandparents lived. I was about ten, and I used to hide among the garbage cans on his back stairs, stay there hour after hour listening to him practice. One day I thought I must: must ring his bell. I asked could I take his picture with my box camera." I wish I could have been a fly on the wall during the years when he and Diane Arbus would get together after their workdays and make the rounds of NYC parties photographing into the night. I do not know if any of those pictures were ever published. Many are not aware that Avedon was a fabulous SP'er, even though he was famous as one of, if not the best, portraitist of our time. Besides the pictures, he left notes along the path. Here are two personal favorites: "I seldom see anything beautiful in a young face. I do, though in the downward curve of Maugham's lips. Isak Dinesen's hands. So much has been written there, there is so much to be read, if one could only read....(These People) are all obsessed. Obsessed with work of one sort or another. To dance, to be beautiful, tell stories, solve riddles, perform in the street. Zavartini's mouth and Escudero's eyes, the smile of Marie-Louise Bousquet: they are sermons on bravado." and ..... "Photographers are lookers with an overdeveloped 'see'. If they are smart they push the 'see' and don't worry if they can't tell Arpege from My Sin. Photographers have to look, keep looking. The eye am the camera." --- Luis