Richard Avedon trained as a cameraman during World War II as a cartography and photography corporal in the Merchant Navy. Sir, yes sir. He spent the day focusing and photographing, but also checking details of already printed images.
It was called military intelligence “That was my job, to identify images. I realized that I had taken about a hundred thousand photos before I realized that I was becoming a photographer”, the photographer would remember many years later.
These days would have been the 100th anniversary of his birth if he had not fallen in the line of duty, camera in hand almost 20 years ago, at a job in San Antonio. Highlighting the importance of Avedon at this point is little short of recklessness, but there are some notes for all audiences.
Just remember that in his first fashion editorials for Harpers’ Bazaar he preferred the street, the outdoors, to studio work, from which he escaped every time he wanted. And with that gesture she started a current tradition. Avedon was a chronicler of the human features of power, governors of California (Schwarzenegger and Reagan, later president), global leaders without position like Malcolm X, with the world scepter like Barack Obama, or enduring figures like Kareem Abdul Jabbar, the basketball player who formerly called Lew Alcindor.
At the same time, he exercised counter-power, he was rebellious and daring, an outlaw who fervently believed in the power of attraction of black models in the world of fashion. Pikes fell on him pointy and from all sides, forcing him to leave Harper’s. His portraits of the fighters for civil rights in the sixties there continue to illuminate those times of racist and segregationist darkness.
Avedon always knew how to get close to good intellectual trees. He is the thinker who, at a very young age, in high school, collaborated with the writer James Baldwin, and later with their friend, Truman Capote. He is the photographer who unveiled the faces of the 20th century American West without preservatives or dyes or barbecue sauce. The one who vivisected without anesthesia the fashion sessions at the Dior house.
The list of jobs, intersections, everlasting images need a very long, very high and a little deep shelf. The powerful Gagosian, at its headquarters in New York, celebrates the centenary of an art comet that orbits above us and continues to leave sparks of surprise.
How to celebrate the hundred years of someone who is not here but whose work is germinating and impacting? What made images so popular and universal whose authorship, paradoxically, has vanished. Examples: the very vertical photo of a skinny and very tall Lew Alcindor (the first name of basketball player Kareem Abdul Jabbar), the sixties collage of photos of Audrey Hepburn, the man half covered in bees. The work that eclipses the author or the author who allows himself to be eclipsed?
Those in charge of the gallery thought of more than 150 personalities to choose as many photos of the New York artist and celebrate the anniversary of someone who received his first retrospective at the age of 39 at the Smithsonian, at the Whitney in 1985 and at the Met (1978 and 2002).
Among the chosen ones, the list is like the anthology of the Met Gala but without dolling up. In alphabetical order, the architect Sir David Adjaye, Hillary Clinton, Sofia Coppola, Cindy Crawford, the photographer Rineke Dijkstra, Ava DuVernay, Sir Elton John, Kim Kardashian, Calvin Klein, Leonard Lauder, Marta Pérez Ortega, Spike Lee, Julianne Moore, François Pinault, the artist Jenny Saville, Chloë Sevigny, Amber Valletta, Tim Walker or Diana-Widmaier Picasso.
Among the images that can be seen in the New York gallery are a rarely seen series of Marilyn Monroe dancing and that emerged in a 1957 session from which the unforgettable sad Marilyn emerged. The exhibit includes a giant-size photo of Tina Turner (see information below) weeks before she died.
The actress Emma Watson, always elegant and vindictive, chose an image of Avedon photographing Donyale Luna, who would become the first black model to star in a Vogue cover. Is New York far away? Are they on their way? They are along the way? Although there are only a few days left of this show that has already extended dates once (now until July 7) and that would have to be permanently extendable.
