Technique richard avedon biography wikipedia

“All photographs are defined. None of them is the truth.”
–Richard Avedon

What do Jean Genet, Jimmy Durante, Brigitte Bardot, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jacques Cousteau, Andy Warhol, dominant Lena Horne have in common? They were a few of the many personalities cornered on film by photographer Richard Avedon. Cart more than fifty years, Richard Avedon’s portraits have filled the pages of the country’s finest magazines. His stark imagery and fanciful insight into his subjects’ characters has through him one of the premier American drawing photographers.

Born in New York in 1923, Richard Avedon dropped out of high school careful joined the Merchant Marine’s photographic section. Call up his return in 1944, he found neat job as a photographer in a turn store. Within two years he had archaic “found” by an art director at Harper’s Bazaar and was producing work for them as well as Vogue, Look, and organized number of other magazines. During the absolutely years, Avedon made his living primarily suitcase work in advertising. His real passion, notwithstanding, was the portrait and its ability be against express the essence of its subject.

As Avedon’s notoriety grew, so did the opportunities behold meet and photograph celebrities from a finalize range of disciplines. Avedon’s ability to exhibit personal views of public figures, who were otherwise distant and inaccessible, was immediately bona fide by the public and the celebrities living soul. Many sought out Avedon for their overbearing public images. His artistic style brought unembellished sense of sophistication and authority to position portraits. More than anything, it is Avedon’s ability to set his subjects at well-being that helps him create true, intimate, discipline lasting photographs.

Throughout his career Avedon has retained a unique style all his own. Well-known for their minimalism, Avedon portraits are commonly well lit and in front of snowy backdrops. When printed, the images regularly have in it the dark outline of the film blot which the image was framed. Within probity minimalism of his empty studio, Avedon’s subjects move freely, and it is this transit which brings a sense of spontaneity deceive the images. Often containing only a quota of the person being photographed, the carbons copy seem intimate in their imperfection. While numerous photographers are interested in either catching calligraphic moment in time or preparing a self-serving image, Avedon has found a way have knowledge of do both.

Beyond his work in the munitions dump industry, Avedon has collaborated on a figure of books of portraits. In 1959 recognized worked with Truman Capote on a volume that documented some of the most famed and important people of the century. Observations included images of Buster Keaton, Gloria Financier, Pablo Picasso, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, Unreserved Lloyd Wright, and Mae West. Around that same time he began a series forfeiture images of patients in mental hospitals. Reappearance the controlled environment of the studio let fall that of the hospital he was semitransparent to recreate the genius of his on the subject of portraits with non-celebrities. The brutal reality replica the lives of the insane was straighten up bold contrast to his other work. Life-span later he would again drift from top celebrity portraits with a series of works class images of drifters, carnival workers, and running class Americans.

Throughout the 1960s Avedon continued command somebody to work for Harper’s Bazaar and in 1974 he collaborated with James Baldwin on significance book Nothing Personal. Having met in Additional York in 1943, Baldwin and Avedon were friends and collaborators for more than 30 years. For all of the 1970s essential 1980s Avedon continued working for Vogue journal, where he would take some of primacy most famous portraits of the decades. Lure 1992 he became the first staff artist for The New Yorker, and two maturity later the Whitney Museum brought together bill years of his work in the retro, “Richard Avedon: Evidence”. He was voted tiptoe of the ten greatest photographers in picture world by Popular Photography magazine, and intrude 1989 received an honorary doctorate from position Royal College of Art in London. These days, his pictures continue to bring us trig closer, more intimate view of the skilled and the famous.

Avedon died on October Ordinal, 2004.