Richard Avedon was an American fashion and portrait
photographer. He really propelled fashion photography to move from the average
motionless sales pitch to photos for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue in which he
demanded emotion and movement from his models. He pushed the boundaries of
fashion photography with surreal, provocative, and often controversial photos,
in which nudity, violence and death were featured.
In addition to his fashion photography, he was also well
known for his portraiture. His black and white portraits were known for
capturing the honest humanity and vulnerability hiding in such larger-than-life
figures as President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Marilyn Monroe, Bob Dylan and The
Beatles. During the 1960s, Avedon also expanded into more explicitly political
photography—civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X
and Julian Bond, etc.
“The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a
photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion,” he once said. “There is no
such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of
them is the truth.”
Fun fact! Avedon was such a cultural force in the 20th
century that he inspired the 1957 film Funny
Face, in which Fred Astaire’s
character is based on Avedon’s life.
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