He photographer New Yorker Richard Avedon (1923-2004) who cultivated with his camera photographic genres as varied as advertising for haute couture or political portraiture, including civil rights in the US, would be 100 years old this May 15.
Facing Avedon’s goal, that helped to blur the dividing lines between fine art and commercial photography, Madona, Ronald Reagan, Malcolm X, Bob Dylan or the American activists of the late 60s known as The Chicago Seven posed, but also countless anonymous people.
In 1944, at the age of 21, he began working as a freelancer for a supplement to the magazine moda Harper’s Bazaar, thanks to the director of the publication, the designer and photographer Alexey Brodovitchof whom Avedon was a student at the New School in New York.
His first job consisted of graphically accompanying an issue dedicated to giving advice to adolescents about modamakeup and lifestyle, but soon her style “set the visual tone of the magazine”as the publication itself stated in an article published in May 2017.
“The women in his images were not statues or seraphs: they were living beings, dancing, jumping, yearning, and moving in a blur. There was a searching in his images, an ephemeral quality”assured the magazine itself.
The same publication highlights the black and white snapshot from 1955 “Dovima with elephants”, in which model Dorothy Virginia Margaret Juba poses in a Dior dress between two elephants. A work that together with other photographs is part of the permanent catalog of the museum of until contemporary New York MoMa.
Among the works that MoMa keeps, most of them portraits, are Brigitte Bardot (1957), The Duke and Duchess of Windsor (1957), John Lennon (1968), Paul MacCartney (1967), the portrait of Simon & Garfunkel for their album Bookends (1968) or the film director John Ford (1972).
“He was fascinated by the ability of the Photography to suggest the personality and evoke the life of the subjects of his portraits. He recorded the poses, attitudes, hairstyles, clothing and accessories as vital and revealing elements of an image, “says the foundation that he created in life and that bears his name.
After his death on September 30, 2004, after suffering a stroke while covering The New Yorker magazine, journalist Andy Grundberg described him in the obituary published by the New York Times as the man “whose fashion photography and portraiture have helped define America’s image of style, beauty, and culture for the past half century.”
Avendon was recognized in life with exhibitions in numerous centers of until with his first solo at the Smithsonian Institution in 1962, a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of until American (1994) or two shows at MoMa in 1978 and 2002.
He worked in addition to for the magazine Bazaar (1946-1965), for other publications of moda as Vogue (1966-1970) or firms such as Revlon, Calvin Klein, Versace o Christian Dior.
As his foundation points out, these works gave him the freedom to undertake other projects in which he explored his cultural, political and personal passions.
2023-05-15 19:41:00
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