| Long before he became the first staff photographer at The New Yorker—where he snapped everyone from a topless Tilda Swinton to a skeptical Anna Deavere Smith—Richard Avedon was a twenty-one-year-old wannabe poet and former member of the Merchant Marine who, in 1944, landed his first gig taking pictures for Harper’s Bazaar. By 1958, he had transformed that job into his own art form, and became the “sprightly and ingenious” subject of a Profile by The New Yorker’s Winthrop Sargeant. When Avedon, who would have turned a hundred next week, got his start, the world of high fashion generally showed a certain “aloofness from human concerns,” Sargeant wrote. Male designers preferred for a model to be gaunt, “as appealing as a mummy,” and stiffly posed on the magazine page. (A pathological wish to “render them harmless,” psychiatrists of the era suggested.) Avedon, by contrast, seemed to love his subjects’ personalities more than the clothes. His Harper’s Bazaar spreads presented not so much pictures of well-dressed women “as a revelatory glimpse of a feminine psyche.” Avedon’s early models—from the sphinxlike Dovima to his first wife, Doe—gambolled with wild-eyed animals, leaped around in the rain, and, in a novel twist, “gave evidence of being human.” While Sargeant strove to explain the young Avedon’s already distinct, iconic aesthetic—it can be hard to describe the concept of chic—Avedon himself seemed interested in other things. “I am always stimulated by people,” he told the writer. “Almost never by ideas.” In the decades following the Profile, Avedon photographed everyone from Colorado coal miners and napalm-burn victims of the Vietnam War to one of the last Americans born into slavery. His first portrait published in this magazine, in 1992, was of Malcolm X. | 
No comments:
Post a Comment