Who doesn’t love a bit of Richard Avedon? You’ve likely seen the American portrait photographer’s fingerprints without realising just what you’re looking at – think Brooke Shields’ suggestively contortionist Calvin Klein ads, Charlie Chaplin with bared teeth and mimed devil horns, Marilyn Monroe looking uncharacteristically askance; the Audrey Hepburn Hijab Hydra. Avedon’s flair for dynamic composition brought a singular artistry to the commercial work for which he is best known. Ron Howard’s new documentary makes the legendary photographer into a mononym, exploring his instinctive talent and position as an esteemed individual in New York’s artistic community.
The film opens with a montage sequence set to Spoon’s a dance-punk art rock anthem ‘I Turn My Camera On’ – another critically acclaimed American export. It’s an appropriate choice for its subject: punchy, off-beat and wildly innovative. Remembered as the “eye of fashion” at the time of his death two decades ago, Avedon achieved a kind of definitive stature that few imagemakers could equal, with retrospectives of his work showing at the Smithsonian Institution, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum even as his star was still rising. Holding staff positions at Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and The New Yorker, Avedon and his work had a near-total institutional approval. But his political leanings saw him seek out rawer images and stories than the constructed, designer-adjacent confections he would come to devise under Condé Nast.
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The circle of Avedon’s peers selected for interview (including magazine editors Tina Brown and Samira Nasr, the choreographer Twyla Tharp, and the art dealer Larry Gagosian) are all formidable forces in their own right. In one talking head, Isabella Rossellini compares the photographer to a hunter, saying he would take only a few precise shots while others would “snap away and edit later.”
Hilton Als speaks reverently of Avedon’s “renegade spirit”, while Twiggy marvels at his ability to imbue his images with “frozen momentum.” In 1964, Avedon published a photobook with his good friend James Baldwin: Nothing Personal featured portraits of psychiatric patients and the descendants of slavery alongside celebrities and figures in the civil rights movement, together with an essay by Baldwin that took aim at the superficiality of American society among other diagnoses of social breakdown. Avedon was very interested in politics and often sought out working class subjects to take portraits of, though some read these images as a kind of fetishisation.
For example, “In the American West” – his unvarnished portraits of miners, housewives, oil rig workers and slaughterhouse employees taken between 1979 and 1984 – divided critics who appreciated him puncturing Americana’s romanticisation of those parts, but felt a certain condescension inherent in the context of the work. Howard’s biography is an accomplished history of an undoubtedly brilliant man, but it doesn’t make room for these kinds of controversies or nuance.
One can’t help but feel that this is perhaps the sunniest version of the events. The ill-treatment of Avedeon’s assistants – of whom he was said to expect “nothing less than devotion” – is raised as a talking point, but ultimately brushed over. “Every photograph is accurate,” Avedon is famously quoted as saying, “but none is the truth.” Full of compelling voices and visual evidence, Howard’s documentary is an impressively accurate portrait of the artist – it just doesn’t ring all the way true.