I'd like to meet:
Chronology
1923 Born, New York City.
1929-41 Attended P.S. 6, De Witt Clinton High School, and Columbia University.
1937-40 Co-editor, with James Baldwin, of The Magpie, De Witt Clinton High School literary magazine.
1941 Poet Laureate of New York City High Schools (The New York Times, May 24, 1941).
1942-44 Served in the U.S. Merchant Marines.
1944-50 Studied with Alexey Brodovitch at The Design Laboratory, New School for Social Research, New York City.
1945-65 Staff photographer for Harper's Bazaar, Editors: Carmel Snow, Diana Vreeland, Alexey Brodovitch, Henry Wolf, Marvin Israel.
1947-84 Photographed the French Collections in Paris for Harper's Bazaar and Vogue.
1949-50 Theatre Arts, editor and photographer.
1950 Art Directors Club, New York, Highest Achievement Medal award.
1957 Visual consultant for the film Funny Face, Paramount Studios, directed by Stanley Donen, with Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn, based on Avedon's career.
1958 Popular Photography magazine, One of the World's Ten Greatest Photographers.
1959 Publication: OBSERVATIONS, photographs by Richard Avedon, text by Truman Capote, designed by Alexey Brodovitch, Simon and Schuster, Inc.
1962 Exhibition: "Richard Avedon," Smithsonian Institute, Washington, D. C., curated by Eugene Ostroff.
1963 Photographed the Civil Rights Movement in the South.
1964 Publication: NOTHING PERSONAL, photographs by Richard Avedon, text by James Baldwin, designed by Marvin Israel, Atheneum.
1966-90 Staff photographer for Vogue, Editors: Alexander Liberman, Diana Vreeland.
1967 Conducted Master Class in Photography with Marvin Israel at the Avedon Studio.
1969 Photographed the Anti-War Movement across America, including the Chicago 7 during the Chicago Conspiracy Trial.
1970 Exhibition: "Richard Avedon," portrait retrospective 1945-1970 at The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, Minnesota, curated by Ted Hartwell, designed by Marvin Israel.
Editor, DIARY OF A CENTURY, photographs by Jacques-Henri Lartigue, designed by Bea Feitler, Viking Press.
1970 Photographed in Vietnam, including the Mission Council.
1973 Publication: ALICE IN WONDERLAND: THE FORMING OF A COMPANY, THE MAKING OF A PLAY photographs by Richard Avedon, text by Doon Arbus, designed by Ruth Ansel, E.P. Dutton.
1974 Exhibition: "Jacob Israel Avedon," portraits of the photographer's father, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, designed by Marvin Israel.
1975 Exhibition: "Portraits, 1969-1975," Marlborough Gallery, New York, designed by Marvin Israel. Venues:
* Seibu Museum, Tokyo, 1977
1976Publication: PORTRAITS, photographs by Richard Avedon, introduction by Harold Rosenberg, Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
Publication: THE FAMILY, Rolling Stone magazine, October 21, special Bicentennial issue, photographed during the 1976 election campaign season, edited by Renata Adler.
THE FAMILY, National Magazine Award for Visual Excellence
1978 Exhibition: "Avedon: Photographs 1947-1977," fashion retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, curated by Colta Ives & Weston Naef. Venues:
* Dallas Museum of Fine Arts;
* High Museum of Art, Atlanta;
* Isetan Museum, Tokyo.
Publication: AVEDON: PHOTOGRAPHS 1947-1977 by Richard Avedon, essay by Harold Brodkey, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island, President's Fellow.
1980Exhibition: "Avedon: 1946-1980," portraits, fashion, reportage, University Art Museum, Berkeley, California, curated by David Ross. University of California, Berkeley, California, Chancellor's Citation.
1982 Art Director's Club, New York, The Hall of Fame.
1985 Exhibition: "In the American West," Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, designed by Marvin Israel, curated by Marni Sandweiss.
Venues:
* Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.;
* San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;
* Art Institute of Chicago;
* Phoenix Art Museum;
* Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston;
* The High Museum, Atlanta.
Publication: IN THE AMERICAN WEST 1979-1984, photographs by Richard Avedon, designed by Marvin Israel, Harry N. Abrams.
Began working for the French publication Egoïste, Editor & publisher: Nicole Wisniak
American Society of Magazine Photographers, Photographer of the Year
Maine Photographic Workshop Nikon Award for the Best Photographer Book of the Year.
Adweek magazine, Commercial Television Director of the Year. Eastman Kodak Award of Excellence as Commercial Television Director of the Year.
1987 Harvard University, Certificate of Recognition, Visiting Artist 1986-87.
1989Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA), Lifetime Achievement Award. Royal College of Art, London, Honorary Doctorate.
1991Installation "Brandenburg Gate, East Berlin, New Year's Eve, December 31, 1989 - January 1, 1990" at the Carnegie International 1991, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation International Photography Prize.
1992Conducted a series of Master Classes in Photography, under the auspices of the International Center of Photography in New York.
First staff photographer for The New Yorker, Editor: Tina Brown, Editor: David Remnick
1993International Center of Photography Master of Photography Award.
Kenyon College, Ohio, Honorary Doctorate
Publication: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY RICHARD AVEDON photographs by Richard Avedon, designed by Mary Shanahan, Random House and Eastman Kodak.
1994 Exhibition: "Richard Avedon Evidence 1944-1994," retrospective, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, curated by Jane Livingston, designed by Mary Shanahan.
Venues:
* Museum Ludwig, Cologne;
* Palazzo Reale, Milan;
* National Portrait Gallery, London;
* Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis.
Publication: EVIDENCE 1944-1994 RICHARD AVEDON, Whitney Museum of American Art, exhibition catalogue, essays by Jane Livingston and Adam Gopnik, edited by Mary Shanahan.
Parsons School of Design, New York, Honorary Doctorate.
EVIDENCE is awarded the Prix Nadar by the Bibliotheque Nationale for the best photographic book of 1994.
1995"In Memory of the Late Mr. and Mrs. Comfort," a fable photographed and created for The New Yorker, November 6, 1995 issue, in collaboration with Doon Arbus.
American Masters Documentary, "Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light," written and directed by Helen Whitney, produced by Susan Lacy for PBS.
1996 Mental Health Association of New York City, Humanitarian Award.
1998 The Alliance for Young Artists & Writers Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts.
1999 Publication: AVEDON THE SIXTIES Richard Avedon and Doon Arbus, Random House, Inc.
Exhibition "Richard Avedon Early Portraits," Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
2000 Exhibition "About Faces," including Richard Avedon portraiture, Fraenkel Gallery San Francisco.
Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, New York, Lifetime Achievement Award
Photo District News: Most Influential Photographer of the Last Twenty Years
Deutsches Centrum für Photographie, Berlin Photography Prize 2000
2001 Inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Exhibition "Richard Avedon: Made in France," Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
Publication: RICHARD AVEDON: MADE IN FRANCE, essay by Judith Thurman, designed by Mary Shanahan and Gregory Wakabayashi, Fraenkel Gallery.
Exhibition: "In the American West,"
Venues:
* Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany;
* Diputacion de Granada, Granada, Spain;
* Fundacion la Caixa, Barcelona, Spain;
* Fundacion la Caixa, Madrid, Spain.
2002Exhibition: "Richard Avedon Portraits," portrait retrospective, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, curated by Maria Morris Hambourg & Mia Fineman.
Publication: RICHARD AVEDON PORTRAITS, in conjunction with exhibition at Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; essay by Richard Avedon, essay by Maria Morris Hambourg & Mia Fineman, designed by Mary Shanahan, Harry N. Abrams.
2003Exhibition: "Richard Avedon," Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.
Performed role of Mr. Apology in "Mr. Apology" by Alec Wilkinson, The Great Hall, Cooper Union, New York.
Royal Photographic Society, 150th Anniversary Medal.
Arts & Business Council, Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Visual Arts.
Americans for the Arts, National Arts Award: Lifetime Achievement.
2004Dies, 1 October, San Antonio, Texas, while on assignment for The New Yorker magazine.
2005The Richard Avedon Foundation established.
Books:
Foreword to In The American West
by Richard Avedon
Beginning in the spring of 1979 I spent the summer months traveling in the West, going to truck stops, stockyards, walking through the crowds at a fair, looking for faces I wanted to photograph. The structure of the project was clear to me almost from the start and each new portrait had to find its place in that structure. As the work progressed, the portraits themselves began to reveal connections of all kinds - psychological, sociological, physical, familial - among people who had never met.
This is how these portraits were made. I photograph my subject against a sheet of white paper about nine feet wide by seven feet long that is secured to a wall, a building, sometimes the side of a trailer. I work in shade because the sunshine creates shadows, highlights, accents on a surface that seem to tell you where to look. I want the source of light to be invisible so as to neutralize its role in the appearance of things.
I use an 8 x 10 view camera on a tripod, not unlike the camera used by Curtis, Brady, or Sander, except for the speed of the shutter and film. I stand next to the camera, not behind it, several inches to the left of the lens and about four feet from the subject. As I work I must imagine the pictures I am taking because, since I do not look through the lens, I never see precisely what the film records until the print is made. I am close enough to touch the subject and there is nothing between us except what happens as we observe one another during the making of the portrait. This exchange involves manipulations, submissions. Assumptions are reached and acted upon that could seldom be made with impunity in ordinary life.
A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about. My concerns are not his. We have separate ambitions for the image. His need to plead his case probably goes as deep as my need to plead mine, but the control is with me.
A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.
The first part of the sitting is a learning process for the subject and for me. I have to decide upon the correct placement of the camera, its precise distance from the subject, the distribution of the space around the figure, and the height of the lens. At the same time, I am observing how he moves, reacts, expressions that cross his face so that, in making the portrait, I can heighten through instruction what he does naturally, how he is.
The subject must become familiar with the fact that, during the sitting, he cannot shift his weight, can hardly move at all, without going out of focus or changing his position in the space. He has to learn to relate to me and the lens as if we were one and the same and to accept the degree of discipline and concentration involved. As the sitting goes on, he begins to understand what I am responding to in him and finds his own way of dealing with that knowledge. The process has a rhythm that is punctuated by the click of the shutter and my assistants changing the plates of film after each exposure. There are times when I speak and times when I do not, times when I react too strongly and destroy the tension that is the photograph.
These disciplines, these strategies, this silent theater, attempt to achieve an illusion: that everything embodied in the photograph simply happened, that the person in the portrait was always there, was never told to stand there, was never encouraged to hide his hands, and in the end was not even in the presence of a photographer.
An Interview with Richard Avedon
by Nicole Wisniak.
Egoïste (September 1984)
Reprinted in Black & White (Yale University, Spring 1986), pp. 8, 26 - 31.
Nicole Wisniak: Do you think a photographer is a person obsessed by the fact that things disappear?
Richard Avedon: I can’t generalize. All that remains of my father is my photograph, that is to say film, but I don’t think that’s why I photograph. I see all the time — I very often don’t listen. I can be in conversation with someone and at a certain point, stop hearing what is said, start pretending to listen. My good friends know when that happens.
The way I see is comparable to the way musicians hear, something extra sensory. Not judgmental. I don’t differentiate between an idea of what is beautiful and what is not. What I see is a reaffirmation of the many things I need to feel. It has to do with obsessive qualities, not explainable. I am a natural photographer. It is my language, I speak through my photographs more intricately, more deeply than with words.
N.W.: But this overdeveloped eye is sometimes pitiless. You reveal in your portraits facets of character that people would perhaps have preferred not to show. Do you think it is possible to hide one’s self in front of your camera?
R.A.: I am not necessarily interested in the secret of a person. The fact that there are qualities a subject doesn’t want me to observe is an interesting fact. Interesting enough for a portrait. It then becomes a portrait of someone who doesn’t want something to show. That is interesting. There is no truth in photography. There is no truth about anyone’s person. My portraits are much more about me than they are about the people I photograph. I used to think that it was a collaboration, that it was something that happened as a result of what the subject wanted to project and what the photographer wanted to photograph. I no longer think it is that at all. The photographer has complete control, the issue is a moral one and it is complicated. Everyone comes to the camera with a certain expectation and the deception on my part is that I might appear to be indeed part of their expectation. If you are painted or written about, you can say: but that’s not me, that’s Bacon, that’s Soutine; that’s not me, that’s Celine.
N.W.: Picasso answered to that saying about Gertrude Stein: "That’s not how she was when I painted her but that’s how she will be sooner or later."
R.A.: That’s pretty grand of him. On the other hand, now that she is dead, visually that is all she is. It is a terrible responsibility for a photographer. The subject was there — the subject can never say — that is not me. It is even worse in the case of photojournalism, when the photograph is taken without permission. At least I ask, "May I do a portrait of you?"
It is complicated and unresolved in my mind because I believe in moral responsibility of all kinds. I feel I have no right to say, "This is the way it is" and in another way, I can’t help myself. It is for me the only way to breathe and to live. I could say it is the nature of art to make such assumptions but there has never been an art like photography before. You cannot make a photograph of a person without that person’s presence, and that very presence implies truth. A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. All photographs are accurate. None of them are truth.
N.W.: You have been working for many years on a new book on the working class. Did you begin this new work because you were fed up with the elite?
R.A.: No, not at all. I have been working for many many years as a portrait photographer, on portraits of Americans. But I used to believe that I could only photograph what I knew and understood. I understood artists, people of high achievement, power, beauty, at least I thought I understood those things. I said once in an interview that I had no idea what it was like to be black or what it was like to be a factory worker, and so I couldn’t photograph them. Of course, it was not true. But it took me a long time to know in my stomach that people share the same concerns, and that confronting an oil worker is very little different than say, a writer. It’s just a question of language. As a matter of fact, the people I have photographed for this book seemed more generous with their selves, less guarded, often easier to see.
N.W.: But not anybody is a good subject for you. How do you choose your subjects?
R.A.: Very few people are suitable subjects for me. In the same way that not everyone looks like a Modigliani or would have been a correct model for Julia Cameron. It’s a difficult question because I don’t formalize these things. I am interested in connections between people of remote experience, in similarities that are unexpected, unexplained. When you see this new book, you will see a man, a worker in Colorado, who has qualities exactly like James Galanos. Galanos is a dress designer in Beverly Hills who dressed the wife of the President Reagan. The man in Colorado is a factory worker who wraps packages. That facinates me. If you look at the portraits of the "Chicago 7," you will find similarities to The Mission Council. Paradox, irony, contradiction — these interest me in a photograph. Contradications within one person: the contrast possibly between the gentleness and the delicacy of the hands of a subject and the suspicion and the lack of trust on his face.
N.W.: There is also a contradiction in your work. Your fashion pictures and then your portraits, which seem to show a more tragic side of life.
R.A.: I don’t think one is at all a reaction to the other, which is a view sometimes held about Penn, Arbus and myself: that the serious, or if you want, the "tragic" quality of our portraits is a reaction to the artificial demands of fashion. I think there is a tendency to categorize photographers with assumptions that would never be made of writers. If an author writes a comedy or a tragedy and then an essay or is politically concerned, no on questions. No one asks why a philosopher writes a novel or a poem, or why Picasso did ballet costumes. That generosity is not extended to fashion photographers. I’ve had to deal with that always — less now — but still.
Fashion photography is not an art that can grow indefinately. It is constantly taking and dealing with the surface of things and that doesn’t attract me anymore. When I was young, my needs as an artist were exactly the needs of the magazine I worked for — Harper’s Bazaar. They published what I wanted to express. (That went on for 20 years–Embarrassing!) At a certain point, the necessities of fashion magazines were no longer mine, no longer interesting.
As a commercial photographer, fashion is a necessary part of my commercial existence. I find it easy. It underwrites and supports my life and other work that I prefer to do.
N.W.: To be a photographer — was it that most obvious way to earn money in the early fifties?
R.A.: My father wanted me to be a businessman because he had suffered terribly as a Russian Jew in New York City at the turn of the century. He had a terrible life as a child, one of six children deserted by his father, sent to an orphan asylum, he had a tragic quality and an exaggerated sense of danger. He wanted me to be prepared for what he calls The Battle in the ways that he felt one had to be prepared: through education, physical strength and money.
I am a complete composite of my mother and father. She began to be a sculptress at 75, working with granite and marble. My mother loved the arts, was politically active, and always encouraged me to be an artist. She was and is completely supportive. During the depression she stole lilacs. She says about artists, "He is the real thing" or "He’s not the real thing" and that’s that.
Anyway, photography was the only thing I could do. I have been a photographer since at least the age of 13. My family was in the business of fashion and my parents subscribed to Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and Vanity Fair when I was a child. I saw fashion photography and theater portraits by Steichen, Munkacsi and Man Ray in each issue and I began to imitate them by photographing my little sister. She was very, very beautiful, two years younger than I. Her beauty was the event of our family and the destruction of her life. She was treated as if there was no one inside her perfect skin, as if she was simply her long throat, her deep brown eyes. I think she believed she existed only as skin, and hair, and a beautiful body. Interestingly enough, I had not looked at a photograph of her in 30 years, and only last week opened a package of my earliest pictures, taken when I was an adolescent. Every family thinks their daughter and son are the most beautiful children in the world, but my sister Louise, (I photographed her from 14 to 18), was truly a world class beauty, and I never knew it until last week. What I discovered was that she was the prototype of what I considered to beautiful in my early years as a fashion photographer. All my first models: Dorian Leigh, Elise Daniels, Carmen, Marella Agnelli, Audrey Hepburn, were brunettes and had fine noses, long throats, oval faces. They were all memories of my sister. My sense of what was beautiful was established very early through the way in which I experienced her.
N.W.: Where is she now?
R.A.: She is dead. She died in a mental institution at the age of 40. She withdrew completely in her late adolesence.
N.W.: You mean she was killed by her beauty?
R.A.: Depersonalized, maybe. Destroyed, possibly; I think really by the power of her beauty. It is as isolating as genius, or deformity. Unlike genius, it is one of the qualities that removes you from the world, but offers no real compensation. I have always been aware of a relationship betweeen madness and beauty. Does this help to explain some of what appear to be contradictions in my work? It’s only one part. It had nothing to do with the discipline of work, and other things, but you will find if you look to the portraits, that connection. A possibility of failure and danger and poetry in life — and the close line.
N.W.: Since 40 years, you have photographed painters, politicians, artists, workers, famous and unfamous people. What feeds your curiosity for people?
R.A.: I don’t think analytic explanations suffice but there is a little bit of truth in everything, in Freud, in Pavlov, in genetics, in enviroment. I grew up with a first cousin, two years older than I. I was deeply in love with her from the age of 4 until I was 18. It was only with her that I could breathe freely. We were precocious from the start. When the Cocteau movie "Les Enfants Terribles" came out, we knew we were those children. We saw it over and over. Our feelings for each other were so intense, so forbidden so conspiritorial. I knew for myself — I can’t speak for her — that if I was ever to complete myself, grow up and out into the world, we had to shatter our perfect hothouse. In all the years that a young man first experiences life apart from the family, I knew only one person. I think my entire character was formed through that powerful relationship. And my life has gone on, one person at a time.
N.W.: This relationship with one person at a time is replayed in your studio, when you do a portrait?
R.A.: Oh yes! Intensely — but in photography it is an unearned intensity. For example, I have never become a friend — or very rarely — of anyone I have photographed. I would never, for many many years, enter a room after photographing a celebrated person and assume that if he were there, he would acknowledge me. The kind of embarassing intensity of these peculiar intimacies and needs, Ü the needs of the subject to give something to the camera and to me, and my need to take that in order to express myself — is complicated and unearned. I have never felt that I had the right to presume that there was anything but the picture between us. It’s less than an hour, and it’s over — completely.
N.W.: Haven’t you ever been seduced by some of these people?
R.A.: As my book Portraits was being completed, there were certain artists whose work had affected me, whom I had not photographed, and one of them was Jean Renoir. Renoir lived in Beverly Hills and I went to him. His home looked like everything I’d always thought a home should be. It looked like south of France. It didn’t look like Beverly Hills. There were flowers in and out of the rooms and sunshine coming through the windows. And a long table in the middle of the room. A long table at the center of a house has always had great meaning for me. When I arrived, I was shown to his bedroom. He was naked, being helped to dress, completely unembarassed by my presence. He was old and quite sick at the time and he walked with difficulty, with a walker. There was something so moving about his face and about his life and his work and what he stood for. He was one of the last people I felt in awe of. When the sitting was over, (in those days I worked with incredible intensity, I mean my heart would pound out of control while I photographed), Renoir said, "Won’t you join us?"
So I sat at the table and some friends arrived with vodka and a Sunday cake and Renoir sat down. Behind him was a portrait of him as a child painted by his father and the potteries he had made as a child guided by his father.
A young Czechoslovakian director who was there visiting started to talk with Renoir about Film. What happened to me used to happen to me very often — I froze, I couldn’t speak or think. I felt inadequate. I thought — what can I say or contribute to anything that happens at this table. Well, actually nothing so grand was happening. I considered myself very good at disguising my feelings and I knew there was no necessity for me to speak. I could legitimately be a quiet person. But I was paralyzed inside. Smiling, trying to appear comfortable, thinking — what right do I have to be at this table? I came to do my photograph, I should leave. I am not a friend of the Renoirs, this is Sunday.
Renoir stood to go to the bathroom and I used that occasion to say goodbye to everyone. As I walked to the front door, he came our of his bedroom with his walker which sort of blocked my way. And we were stuck there, in the narrow hall, in this confrontation. I extended my hand and said, "Monsiour Renoir, thank you very much for allowing me to photograph you." And he looked into my eyes and spoke, and I’ll never forget his words, "It is not what is said that matters, it’s the feelings that cross the table."
I froze my face. I walked to the car and wept. Imagine a man in his eighties, sick as he was, knowing what was happening to me at the table, and to care, and to say it. Well, that’s my kind of standard for human behavior. To be able to be that present in each moment. The quality of paying attention that he had, and then the compassion. I think there is not much more to life than that story: to be that age, surrounded by your father’s works of art, to have created your own, to live in a house with sunshine falling through the windows, and a wife, and a jar of vodka with spirals of lemon rind in it, and friends and your own son who has become a teacher and his children sitting with the grownÜups, on Sunday — and to still pay that kind of attention to a stranger.
N.W.: Do you have any regrets?
R.A.: I never felt that anything I ever did was good enough and frankly, a large part of me still thinks exactly that way about everything I do — it is not good enough — nothing is ever even near good enough. But that’s not a regret. I just feel that I know more than I can put into my work.
N.W.: Does it make you suffer?
R.A.: No. Not that. It makes me work.
N.W.: What makes you anxious?
R.A.: The unexplainable shifts of my feelings. From moment to moment I can shift from someone who thinks he can deal with everything to someone who can’t think. It has nothing to do with reality. I like to believe it’s chemical. I used to think there was a Freudian answer. (He laughs). What I do know about myself is that I am best in intense short encounters. I mean the way in which making pictures is very intense and short, compared to writing.
Everything I do, it seems to me, has passion about it and then suddenly the drop and then withdrawal, which is not necessarily depression. It can be planes or sleep or doing puzzles, but I have to pull back. I am not capable of living on my most intense level for a long period of time. I think might crack. That’s probably why I still do a bit of fashion photography — to relieve the tension.
N.W.: Did you ever feel it would have been possible for you to become insane?
R.A.: Maybe, when I was young, yes. At certain periods when there were real life pressures, rites that seemed impossible to meet, I thought: I am not going to make it. But I always had the ability to escape into reality, into work. Many things have called to me in my life, many things in all areas of my life, and they have found their proper home in my photographs.
N.W.: But not on your face. You look very serene.
R.A.: It’s because, perhaps, the storm approaches my pictures instead of my face. That’s a funny thought. (He laughs.)
AN AVEDON PORTRAIT
October 24, 2002
PBS
Arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown reports on a show looking back on the influential works of photographer Richard Avedon. JEFFREY BROWN: A portrait by Richard Avedon is instantly recognizable. Often the subject is well-known: A celebrity like Marilyn Monroe; a political figure like Henry Kissinger; singer Marian Anderson, from the world of the arts. But even when the man in the photo is an unknown drifter, the Avedon signature is there. Black and white images--no background, no props, just individuals in a void, staring out of the frame. A chance to stare back is offered at New York's Metropolitan Museum in a major retrospective of 180 portraits.
This turns out to be an homage to a neighborhood son. Avedon grew up just blocks from the museum, and used to roam its halls after school. He first made his name as a fashion photographer, in magazines such as Harper's Bazaar and Vogue. But portraiture is the work he does for himself, and it's become a key part of what makes the 79-year-old perhaps the world's most famous photographer. We talked in the museum's exhibition hall. I asked him what he's after when he takes a portrait.
RICHARD AVEDON: I'm trying to condense all of my feelings about what it is to be any one of us. It's not... it's specific, and at the same time it's general. I come into this room, and I can't help but see what I think at the moment about each of you. I could be completely wrong, but the combination of what's there, no... it's like fingerprints; no two people are alike. But they all express facets of the same thing.
JEFFREY BROWN: Help me, for our audience, conjure up what it really looks like when you take a portrait of someone. How far away is the subject? Not very far, right?
RICHARD AVEDON: Exactly as far away as I am from you.
JEFFREY BROWN: As you and I are, so we can reach out; we could touch?
RICHARD AVEDON: Yeah.
JEFFREY BROWN: And you're using a large camera on a tripod, but you're not behind it, you're next to it?
RICHARD AVEDON: Next to it. So when the sitter or the subject is looking into the lens, he's not looking at me.
JEFFREY BROWN: The sitter is looking into the lens.
RICHARD AVEDON: Yeah, unless he's looking a little over the horizon, and that's when he's looking at me. So I'm able, through conversation... in other words, I could make you laugh right now if I wanted to. I've done it, right?
JEFFREY BROWN: Mm-hmm.
RICHARD AVEDON: Click! In other words, I'm in a very controlling position, and I can bring... and I've already... if the camera's on you, your face is very concentrated. You're listening. You don't know what I'm going to say next, and now you're smiling. All these things are the things I work with.
JEFFREY BROWN: When you're taking the photographs, do you take many photographs? Are you talking to the person while it's happening? Is it a kind of confrontation, or is it a conversation?
RICHARD AVEDON: It's all of those things, every one of them. It's a subtle, unspoken collaboration between myself and the person who is in front of the camera.
JEFFREY BROWN: For decades, Avedon's portraits have served as a chronicle of the times. The exhibition playfully features a '60s era face-off between key figures of the Vietnam War effort, called the Mission Council, and the antiwar activists known as the Chicago Seven. A series of photographs called "The Family" shows the American business and political elite of the 1970s. Some of them-- here is a young Donald Rumsfeld-- are very much still with us. But Avedon's prime focus has been on leading cultural figures: Actors Buster Keaton and a playful Charlie Chaplin; writers like Ezra Pound and Truman Capote; composer Igor Stravinsky. Avedon often shows a different side of famous faces, as here, with Groucho Marx. He captured the larger-than- life personality of one of his favorite writers, Isak Dinesan, in a Copenhagen hotel room.
RICHARD AVEDON: The door bell rang, and I looked at the door, and this woman in this uncured black wolf coat said, "I judge people by what they think of King Lear." I was in my early 20s, and I never spoke again. I just did the picture, and she left.
JEFFREY BROWN: Later, Avedon photographed former President Eisenhower near the end of his life at his retirement home on a golf course.
RICHARD AVEDON: Old retired people would go by in their golf carts and say, "Hi, Ike!" And this ravishing smile would come across his face, and then die. And that's what I saw-- had nothing to do with the public image of him as a smiling President.
JEFFREY BROWN: Avedon would later take a series of portraits of his own father in his last years.
JEFFREY BROWN: You've said a number of times, you say, "All photographs are accurate; none of them is the truth."
RICHARD AVEDON: They're representations of what's there. "This jacket is cut this way"; that's very accurate. This really did happen in front of this camera at this... at a given moment. But it's no more truth... the given moment is part of what I'm feeling that day, what they're feeling that day, and what I want to accomplish as an artist.
JEFFREY BROWN: So the old line, "the camera never lies"...
RICHARD AVEDON: Camera lies all the time. It's all it does is lie, because when you choose this moment instead of this moment, when you... the moment you've made a choice, you're lying about something larger. Lying is an ugly word. I don't mean lying. But any artist picks and chooses what they want to paint or write about or say. Photographers are the same.
JEFFREY BROWN: Not everyone is always happy with the results. Avedon took this portrait of the renowned literary critic Harold Bloom.
RICHARD AVEDON: And he said, "I hate that picture. It doesn't look like me." Well, for a very smart man to think that a picture is supposed to look like him... would you go to Modigliani and say, "I want it to look like me?"
JEFFREY BROWN: But, see, we think of photography differently, don't we? We take pictures of each other all the time, and we want it... we expect it to look like us.
RICHARD AVEDON: How many pictures have you torn up because you hate them? What ends up in your scrapbook? The pictures where you look like a good guy and a good family man, and the children look adorable-- and they're screaming the next minute. I've never seen a family album of screaming people.
JEFFREY BROWN: You do have, though, people say, "I don't like this; this isn't me."
RICHARD AVEDON: Pretty general response.
JEFFREY BROWN: It doesn't worry you?
RICHARD AVEDON: No. Worry? I mean, it's a picture, for God's sake.
JEFFREY BROWN: Avedon's portraits have been very much part of, even helped define, our age of celebrity. It's a symbiotic relationship: Avedon, the celebrity photographer; celebrities, eager to be photographed. But Avedon has also looked hard at the decidedly unfamous. In the early '80s, he traveled through the American West and took pictures of young people, workers, and especially drifters.
RICHARD AVEDON: Do you know Beckett's play "Waiting for Godot"? It's about hoboes, about men who are lost out on the road, waiting for something, waiting for some answer. And I found that in drifters... and these people are so raw in their emotions.
JEFFREY BROWN: Avedon took photographs of "Waiting for Godot's" author, Samuel Beckett, wearing a better cut of suit, but displaying the same craggy face as the western drifters -- and this, of actor Bert Lahr, in character from the play, taken in 1956.
JEFFREY BROWN: You wrote in the catalog essay that "Photography is a sad art." Why?
RICHARD AVEDON: It's something about a minute later, it's gone, it's dead, and the only thing that lives on the wall is the photograph. And do you realize that in this exhibition, almost everyone is dead? They're all gone, and their work lives, and the photograph lives. They never get old in a photograph. So it's sad in that way.
JEFFREY BROWN: At the very end of the exhibition is a portrait of Richard Avedon. It's a triptych of poses. So how does the master portrait- maker come to make a portrait of himself?
RICHARD AVEDON: I see pictures of myself and I always knew that what I was feeling didn't look like that guy in the pictures. But my face is beginning to look like an Avedon. It look a long while. And I looked in the mirror and I thought, okay, I think I can photograph this face.
JEFFREY BROWN: Avedon is beginning to look like an Avedon?
RICHARD AVEDON: Yeah, finally.
JEFFREY BROWN: Well, Richard Avedon, thank you for talking to us.
RICHARD AVEDON: Thank you.
Borrowed Dogs
(as it appeared in Richard Avedon Portraits, 2002)
When I was a boy, my family took great care with our snapshots. We really planned them. We made compositions. We dressed up. We posed in front of expensive cars, homes that weren’t ours. We borrowed dogs. Almost every family picture taken of us when I was young had a different borrowed dog in it. The photographs on these pages are of my mother, my sister and myself. It seemed a necessary fiction that the Avedons owned dogs. Looking through our snapshots recently, I found eleven different dogs in one year of our family album. There we were in front of canopies and Packards with borrowed dogs, and always, forever, smiling. All of the photographs in our family album were built on some kind of lie about who we were, and revealed a truth about who we wanted to be.
When I first looked at the portraits of Egon Schiele-I hadn’t really known his work until The Museum of Modern Art’s "Vienna 1900" show in 1986-I was excited. They seemed to me some of the highest examples of portraiture without borrowed dogs. So when Kirk Varnedoe, curator of the show, invited me to give a lecture at the museum, I began thinking of what I might say about Schiele. I thought I would contrast Schiele’s candor and complexity with the entire tradition of flattery and lies in portrait-making.
I’ve always thought that Rembrandt was the master of empty ennoblement in portraiture and that he was the most dangerous "Master of the Borrowed Dog" simply because he is the most perfect and seductive of painters. I was prepared to say hard things about Rembrandt, and it just didn’t seem like a swift thing to do. I decided to decline Varnedoe’s offer.
Now, what I’m about to tell you is true in every detail.
The morning that I made up my mind not to attempt to speak in public about Schiele and Rembrandt, I walked from my study into my bedroom (I’d been having carpenters build bookshelves under my bed), and there by the window was Rembrandt himself, standing in my bedroom in Rembrandt light. There, holding a hammer, dressed as a carpenter, was the genius himself. I reached for Kenneth Clark’s book on Rembrandt and showed Rembrandt, the carpenter, the chapter on his self-portraits. The carpenter agreed that they were absolutely of him. He pointed to one and said, "This one, of course, when I was younger." I set up my camera, asked him to imitate the drawings I’d shown him, and did a few snapshots. (All this happened in five minutes.) Rembrandt the carpenter acted Rembrandt the painter exactly. It seemed undeniable to me that Rembrandt must have been acting when he made his own self-portraits. It was so clear. Rembrandt was telling me that he was acting when he drew himself. Not just making faces, but always, throughout his life, working in the full tradition of performance. Elaborate costumes, a turban, a beret, a cloak, the rags of a beggar, the golden cloth of a sultan, and someone’s dog-he was really performing in a very self-conscious way. And then I realized, thanks to Rembrandt the carpenter, that it was precisely this quality of performance that links Rembrandt and Schiele, but which Schiele took to an inspiring and radical extreme. And that performance ought to be the real subject of my talk, just as it is the real subject of all portraits that interest me. So I changed my mind.
Portraiture is performance, and like any performance, in the balance of its effects it is good or bad, not natural or unnatural. I can understand being troubled by this idea-that all portraits are performances-because it seems to imply some kind of artifice that conceals the truth about the sitter. But that’s not it at all.
The point is that you can’t get at the thing itself, the real nature of the sitter, by stripping away the surface. The surface is all you’ve got. You can only get beyond the surface by working with the surface. All that you can do is to manipulate that surface-gesture, costume, expression-radically and correctly. And I think Schiele understood this in a unique, profound, and original way. Rather than attempting to abandon the tradition of the performing portrait (which is probably impossible anyway), it seems to me that Schiele pushed it to extremes. He shattered the form by turning the volume up to a scream. And so what we see in Schiele is a kind of recurring push and pull: first toward pure "performance," gesture and stylized behavior pursued for its own sake, studied for its own sake; then these extreme stylizations are preserved in form, but disoriented, taken out of their familiar place, and used to change the nature of what a portrait is.
I think this begins with hands and gesture in Schiele’s portraits. All portrait artists have to think about what to do with hands. It’s not at all that a portrait is a kind of arrested moment in a stream of gesture. Gesture just doesn’t proceed in lockstep with thought. On the contrary, gesture in life always follows thought and precedes words. You extend your hand, then say, "Hello"-if you reverse the order, something else is going on. In a fixed image, there’s no possibility of one act informing the other. Nor is gesture in a portrait just pantomime, where the artist invents a meaningful gesture. Where the hands go is intimately tied up with the expressive quality of an image, its graphic rhythm as a whole, as well as its psychological and emotional content.
The first thing I saw in Schiele was a kind of marionette imagery. The Self-Portrait with Raised Left Hand is a good example. This laboratory of splayed fingers seems oblique and purposefully unrevealing-an experiment an artist might do if he was trying to find some random or chance or unpredictable element to break a stereotyped form.
On second look, it became clear to me that Schiele’s new language of hands really affects things in a fundamental way. First of all, what starts out as pantomime becomes part of a larger graphic scheme-a jagged, spindled rhythm that you see as clearly in Schiele’s flowers as in his figures. And then I realized that Schiele used such apparently aberrant gestures to create a new language of expression that is much more convincing than the artist’s traditional inventory of postures and poses. To begin in pure marionette theater and end with an image and gesture to do with intellect-Schiele’s pulling down of the eye-is much truer and more beautiful than, say-to scrape the bottom of the barrel-Rodin’s Thinker.
The ultimate expression of this kind of performance-extreme stylized behavior-is, of course, fashion. In fashion, everything-the entire body, hair, makeup, fabric-is all used to create a performance. So many portraits in the history of art are fashion portraits, fashion images, as in so many beautiful Klimts. Schiele certainly understood fashion and seems to have been fascinated by it. But while Schiele never abandoned the theatrical conventions of fashion, he intensified them in a way that transformed their meaning.
I think the masterpiece of this particular-and particularly daring-aspect of Schiele’s work occurs in the self-portrait in a jail cell, which he called Hindering the Artist Is a Crime, it Is Murdering Life in the Bud! Here, in the extreme of humiliation and pain, while imprisoned for the power of his work, he draws himself in an explosion of form, equal to the most extravagant ideal of fashion. No man’s garment flows so lyrically in the best of times, let alone the worst.
Another element of performance is, of course, the prop. It’s significant that Schiele in his portraits deprived himself of props and scenery. He used empty backgrounds. They’re so spare.
As one who is addicted to white backgrounds, it seems odd to me that a gray or tonal background is never described as being empty. But in a sense that’s correct. A dark background fills. A white background empties. A gray background does seem to refer to something-a sky, a wall, some atmosphere of comfort and reassurance-that a white background doesn’t admit. With the tonal background, the artist is allowed the romance of a face coming out of the dark. You won’t find any portraits with white backgrounds before Schiele. Maybe in drawings. Never in paintings, with the possible exception of the white icons of Novgorod. It’s so hard with a white background not to let the graphic element take over. It’s so hard to give emotional content to something so completely and potentially caricatural, dominated by that hard, unyielding edge. And that, of course, is the challenge and importance of it. If you can make it work successfully, a white background permits people to become symbolic of themselves.
There’s an element of sexuality in all portraiture; the moment you stop to look, you’ve been picked up. And you may look at a portrait with a concentration you’re not allowed in life. Is there any situation in life where you can stare at the Duchess of Alba for half an hour without ending up dead at the hands of the Duke? A confrontational, erotic quality, I think, should underline all portraiture. But in the history of art before Schiele, this confrontational quality of portraiture was almost never explored, so far as I know, in explicitly erotic images. Even eroticized portraits tended to be voyeuristic rather than confrontational.
Rather than seeking to make "sexy" images, it seems to me that Schiele began with the knowledge of the complexity implicit in the sexuality of all portraiture, and then again turned up the volume. He seems to have been at once excited and revolted by the erotic nature of portraiture. For all the high degree of sexuality in his work, there’s an interesting lack of sensuality. It’s as though he is saying, "You want to see? I’ll give you something to look at. And my painting will look at you looking at me." Is there an image in art before Schiele’s Self-Portrait in Black Cloak, Masturbating of a man, rather than a woman, masturbating? Schiele engaged in the performance of masturbation; he presents it as a performance.
All of Schiele’s knowledge about being a portrait painter-about performing the act, about watching himself performing the act, and painting himself performing the act, and then about looking at the painting he made-seems, to me, wrapped up in this image. It also seems, to me, a bad performance, though a radical one. This picture fails as a metaphor from the neck up because of Schiele’s youthful addiction to sentimentality in the treatment of his own face. It’s in the face that we see The Loneliness of the Masturbator-this head expresses a much more banal conception than does the subtlety of this body. It seems to me to limit the picture’s power by making masturbation acceptable in art only as a pleasureless act, instead of a frenzied, complicated, pleasurable, destructive wacking-off. Imagine, say, the head from Schiele’s Grimacing Man on this Schiele body.
Forgive me. I know I’ve gone too far. Presuming to say what Schiele should have done or might have done is out of the question.
Let me end with a story that may say something about how these ideas relate to my own work.
In 1975 I had arrived at the point in my career where I was no longer interested in doing portraits of persons of power and accomplishment. However, there were three men whose work I admired enormously and whose portraits I wanted to make: Jorge Luis Borges, Samuel Beckett, and Francis Bacon. Their portraits turned out to involve three different kinds of performances: Borges gave an unphotographable performance, Beckett refused to perform, and Bacon offered a perfect performance.
I photograph what I’m most afraid of, and Borges was blind.
On the plane to Buenos Aires, I discovered that Borges’s mother, with whom I knew he had lived all of his life, had died that evening. I assumed, of course, that the sitting would be canceled. But he received me, as we had planned, the next afternoon at four o’clock. I arrived at his apartment and found myself in the dark. He was sitting in gray light, on a small settee, and signaled with his hand for me to sit beside him. Almost immediately, he told me that he admired Kipling and asked me to read to him. "Go to the bookcase and find the seventh book from the right on the second shelf," he said. I did. He told me what poem of Kipling’s he wanted to hear-"The Harp Song of the Dane Women"-and I read it to him. He joined in occasionally. Did I know Anglo-Saxon? he asked next. Which would I prefer, legend or elegy? Elegy, I chanced. He explained to me, as he prepared to recite, that his dead mother lay in the adjoining room. Her hands had clenched in pain just before her death, he explained, and then he described how he and their servant had straightened out each of his mother’s fingers, one by one, until her hands lay in peace on her breast. Then he recited the Anglo-Saxon elegy, his voice rising and falling in the dark room.
The first time I saw him in light, it was my light. I was overwhelmed with feeling and I started to photograph. But the photographs turned out to be emptier than I had hoped. I thought I had somehow been so overwhelmed that I had brought nothing of myself to the portrait.
Four years later, I read an account by Paul Theroux of his visit to Borges. It was my visit: the dim light, the trip to the bookcase, Kipling, the Anglo-Saxon recital. In some way, it seemed Borges had no visitors. People who came from the outside could exist for him only if they were made part of his familiar inner world, the world of poets and ancients who were already his true companions. The people in that world knew more, argued better, had more to tell him. The performance permitted no interchange. He had taken his own portrait long before, and I could only photograph that.
In 1979 I went to Paris to photograph Samuel Beckett. As we were about to walk around the corner to the camera and white paper, Beckett spoke. "This is very painful for me," he said. I chose to believe him-though the remark might have been meant in another way-and, after taking a few exposures, stopped the sitting almost before it began. I’m still not certain that I did the correct thing.
My sitting with Francis Bacon was planned for a Sunday morning also in Paris that same year. I had set up my outdoor studio on the shady side of the Musèe d’Art Moderne at the Trocadero. Bacon came in a striped shirt, leather pants, and a checked jacket, dressed to kill, dressed to be photographed. And we had a charming conversation about the differences between living in Paris and London. It was a sunny day, and a really lovely, civilized exchange. Then I began the portrait. I explained the nature of the diptych I wanted to achieve. I’d made a little sketch of what I hoped to do. I asked him to exchange his jacket for my plain, dark sweater. And then I asked him to bring his hand up into the portrait. If I’d asked the same of a politician or banker, or for that matter, any one of us, the tendency would be for the subject to want to look distinguished, sage, to rest a chin on a hand, or bring a hand to a forehead. Bacon immediately acted the role of the private Bacon with the greatest purity and economy of gesture, and yet it was filled with authentic feeling. Without my saying a word, he understood what my portrait was about, what it called for from him, and he still remained true to himself. No one could act Bacon but Bacon. On this perfect, clear Sunday, facing the Eiffel Tower, he achieved an honorable and perfect performance.
Photography is a sad art. It’s gone but it remains. When I was young, death was one of my subjects. I photographed Jean Renoir, Stravinsky, John Ford, artists at the end of their lives, and my dying father. (I’m no longer interested in approaching this subject through my work. It’s too close for art. Death is a young poet’s romance, and an old man’s business.)
My father, Jacob Israel Avedon, was a teacher before he was a businessman. It was my father who taught me the physics of photography. When I was a boy he explained to me the power of light in the making of a photograph. He held a magnifying glass between the sun and a leaf and set the leaf on fire. The next day, as an experiment, I taped a negative of my sister onto my skin and spent the day at Atlantic Beach.
That night, when I peeled the negative off, there was my sister, sunburned onto my shoulder. I knew from the beginning that being a photographer and playing with light means playing with fire. Neither the photographer nor the subject gets out of it unsinged.
In 1970, I showed my father for the first time one of the portraits that I had made of him in the years just before. He was wounded. My sense of what is beautiful was very different from his. I wrote to him to try and explain.
Dear Dad,
I’m putting this in a letter because phone calls have a way of disappearing in the whatever it is. I’m trying to put into words what I feel most deeply, not just about you, but about my work and the years of undefinable father and son between us. I’ve never understood why I’ve saved the best that’s in me for strangers like Stravinsky and not for my own father.
There was a picture of you on the piano that I saw every day when I was growing up. It was by the Bachrach studio and heavily retouched and we all used to call it "Smilin’ Jack Avedon"-it was a family joke, because it was a photograph of a man we never saw, and of a man I never knew. Years later, Bachrach did an advertisement with me-Richard Avedon, Photographer-as a subject. Their photograph of me was the same as the photograph of you. We were up on the same piano, where neither of us had ever lived.
I am trying to do something else. When you pose for a photograph, it’s behind a smile that isn’t yours. You are angry and hungry and alive. What I value in you is that intensity. I want to make portraits as intense as people. I want your intensity to pass into me, go through the camera and become a recognition to a stranger. I love your ambition and your capacity for disappointment, and that’s still as alive in you as it has ever been.
Do you remember you tried to show me how to ride a bicycle, when I was nine years old? You had come up to New Hampshire for the weekend, I think, in the summer when we were there on vacation, and you were wearing your business suit. You were showing me how to ride a bike, and you fell and I saw your face then. I remember the expression on your face when you fell. I had my box Brownie with me, and I took the picture.
I’m not making myself clear. Do you understand?
Love, Dick
When he died, in 1973, I found this letter saved in the inside pocket of the jacket of his best suit, the one he never wore.
Afterword to Lartigue
by Richard Avedon
Paris. February 15, 1970
Diary of a Century: Jacques Henri Lartigue.
Text by Jacques Henri Lartigue. Edited and with an afterword by Richard Avedon. Designed by Bea Feitler. New York: Viking Press, 1970.
Photography has always reminded me of the second child…trying to prove itself. The fact that it wasn’t really considered an art…that it was considered a craft…has trapped almost every serious photographer. Made them fall for some formalized ideal of…what was beautiful. Textures. Shadows. Pears as asses and sand dunes as breasts. Photographs of sculpture by moonlight. It has brought them to…great themes. Hunger. War. "The Human Condition." Things photography could do that painting couldn’t. It’s always been in relation to the older brother…Nadar put his sitters in clamps and arranged the folds of their clothes. Steichen made portraits of world-famous men as if they were…already in marble. High-speed film was available since the turn of the century but for years it was only used in sports photography…as if there were some tacit agreement among photographers to remain within the provinces of painting in the hope of assuring their position as artists.
I think Jacques Henri Lartigue is the most deceptively simple and penetrating photographer in the short…embarrassing history of that so-called art. While his predecessors and contemporaries were creating and serving traditions he did what no photographer has done before or since. He photographed his own life. It was as if he knew instinctively and from the very beginning that the real secrets lay in small things. And it was a kind of wisdom–so much deeper than training and so often perverted by it–that he never lost. There is almost no one in this book who isn’t a friend…no moment that wasn’t a private one.
Lartigue never exhibited his pictures until 1962. He never thought of himself as a photographer. It was just something he did every day…every day for seventy years. Out of love of it. And every day his eye refined and his skill with a camera grew. He was an amateur…never burdened by ambition or the need to be a serious person.
But it would be a great mistake to credit his artistry merely to the fact that he was not corrupted by professionalism. Or to say that his work is the product of accident…that his photographs are extraordinary because the people around him were. Or the time in which he lived. Hundreds of children with similar backgrounds were given cameras in those days–but they never became Lartigues. And accidents are capricious. They just don’t happen that often. They can’t produce a single body of work so consistently brilliant. Lartigue is not a reporter and his best photographs are not those gained by chance.
From the earliest possible age Lartigue kept a little diary. At the top of each page there was always a drawing of the sun or a cloud…and some initials: T.B., B., T.T.B. They stood for Très beau. Beau. Très très beau…That was the weather. It was always a good day. It almost never rained. Ever…And then there would be a quick description of what he did that day. Who visited the house. Where they went…And half the page devoted to drawings of what he’d photographed, because the developing was a very risky process and often the pictures didn’t come out. So, afraid that he might never see the pictures that he’d taken, he would draw from memory what he’d photographed. And in the diaries, which went on for many years, you can see the photographs that have since become masterpieces…drawn. And the miracle of these little drawings is that he had captured exactly the way a scarf had been caught by the wind the moment he clicked the shutter. And they’re accurate. Absolutely accurate. Which means a perfect memory…and a complete sense of what he’d wanted. And this obsessiveness went on every year of his life. The files. The scrapbooks. They’re all over the apartment. The perfection of those files. In a second, he can find any glass negative from…1911–neatly kept in perfect condition.
And the events he photographs…so many of them are the result of his own invention. He creates them. For example, I had invited him to lunch at my studio one day…he and his wife, Florette. It was a bit of an occasion…so we had special food. A little French…And he was in full form. Laughing. Telling stories. And suddenly, at the peak of his spirits, he reached over for a carrot and toasted us all with it. I took another carrot and toasted him back. And as I raised my hand, his camera came out and…click. A picture of me toasting everyone with a carrot!
And that’s the secret. Bichonnade didn’t just jump down the stairs like that on her way to…the Métro. It was Lartigue who made her do that. And he was ten years old at the time…And his suggestions are rarely direct. They’re oblique. They come from impulses, not ideas. I’m sure he didn’t say, "Bichonnade, jump down the steps." I‘m sure he leaped down the steps himself and she followed him but by the time she did, he was there with his camera…Obviously Simone didn’t go into the Bois on her seventy-fifth birthday and leap around. Nor did the entire family just happen to climb into bed together. He made those pictures happen. His photographs are so…palpable. They imply things that happened before and after the photographs were taken. They remind us of what we were never there to know…The uncles fighting–probably my favorite photograph in the entire book. There are two uncles. They’re sitting on a pole that’s extended over the pool…and they’re having a pillow fight. In the distance is a woman. We don’t know who she is. And somehow…from the angle of the photograph…it seems to have been taken by a little boy who’s been told to take his nap…and he’s looked out of the window because he’s heard laughter…that grownup laughter. I mean I think uncles are the most important thing you can have…as a child. And the quality the print has taken on over the years…with the edges sort of burnt away. If there can be a sort of physical quality of memory…a physicalization of memory. It’s like a photograph in a dream…And what did that fight mean? Was it really all in fun? And which uncle did the woman love?
I feel that’s how it was all supposed to be…Fathers who gave their sons secret gardens. Brothers who flew airplanes…built them and flew them…and jumped off walls with umbrellas…and wives who posed for their wedding portraits on the toilet. It’s just staggering how lost that all is…to the whole world. Lartigue has shown us a laughter that is past and the laughter we have traded it for. He has shown us leisure as an adventure and as an indulgence and made us know the full impact of what is lost.
Henry Kissinger's Portrait
by Richard Avedon
I once went to Washington for what they call a "photo opportunity" with Henry Kissinger. As I led him to the camera, he said a puzzling thing. He said, "Be kind to me." I wish there had been time to ask him exactly what he meant, although it's probably clear. Now, Kissinger knows a lot about manipulation, so to hear his concern about being manipulated really made me think. What did he mean? What does it really mean to "be kind" in a photograph? Did Kissinger want to look wiser, warmer, more sincere than he suspected he was? Do photographic portraits have different responsibilities to the sitter than portraits in paint or prose? Isn't it trivializing and demeaning to make someone look wise, noble (which is easy to do), or even conventionally beautiful when the thing itself is so much more complicated, contradictory, and therefore fascinating? Was he hoping that the photograph would reveal a perfect surface? Or is it just possible that he could have wished - as I would have if I were being photographed - that "being kind" would involve allowing something more complicated about me to burn through: my anger, ineptitude, strength, vanity, my isolation. If all these things are aspects of character, would I not, as an artist, be unkind to treat Kissinger as a merely noble face? Does the perfect surface have anything to do with the artistic integrity of a portrait?
A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he's being photographed, and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he's wearing or how he looks. He's implicated in what's happening, and he has a certain real power over the result. The way someone who's being photographed presents himself to the camera and the effect of the photographer's response on that presence is what the making of a portrait is about. The philosopher Roland Barthes once said a very wise thing about photography. He said, "Photography is a captive of two intolerable alibis. On the one hand, 'ennobled art pictures.' On the other hand, 'reportage' which derives its prestige from the object. Neither conception is entirely correct." He said, "Photography is a Text, a complex meditation on meaning."
What Barthes recognized is that we need a new vocabulary to talk about photography. Not "art" versus "reality," "artifice" versus "candor," "subjective" versus "objective" - photography falls in between these classifications, and that's why it's so impossible to answer questions like "Is photography really art?" and "Is this an accurate picture of your friend?" As I have said on other occasions, "All photographs are accurate. None is the truth."
I don't think pictures have to justify their existence by calling themselves works of art or photographic portraits. They are memories of a man; they are contradictory facets of an instant of his life as a subject - and of our lives as viewers. They are, as Barthes said, texts, and as such they exist to be read, interpreted, and argued over - not categorized and judged.
So who is Henry Kissinger? And what, or who, is this photograph? Is it just a shadow representation of a man? Or is it closer to a doppelgänger, a likeness with its own life, an inexact twin whose afterlife may overcome and replace the original?
When I see my pictures in a museum and watch the way people look at my pictures, and then turn to the pictures myself and see how alive the images are, they seem to have little to do with me. They have a life of their own. Like the actors in Pirandello, or in Woody Allen's movie The Purple Rose of Cairo, when the actors leave the screen and join the audience. They have confrontations with the viewers Photography is completely different from every other form of art. I don't really remember the day when I stood behind my camera with Henry Kissinger on the other side. I'm sure he doesn't remember it either. But this photograph is here now to prove that no amount of kindness on my part could make this photograph mean exactly what he - or even I - wanted it to mean. It's a reminder of the wonder and terror that is a photograph.
