Richard Avedon was one of the most influential American photographers of the 20th century, in the tradition of Walker Evans, Robert Mapplethorpe and Diane Arbus.
Born in 1923, this portrait artist joined, so to speak, the merchant marine when he was hired to shoot ID photos of crew members with his Rollei camera, a gift from his father Jacob.
Alexey Brodovitch, artistic director at Harper’s Bazaar, quickly became his mentor and close friend, sensing the talent of this young advertising photographer.
Avedon went on to create a legendary series of photos for Harper’s, and for Vogue as well, revolutionizing the world of fashion photography by shattering old norms and injecting irony, movement and glamor into a field where rigidness had once reigned.
In parallel with his work in fashion, Avedon developed little by little his extraordinary portrait style. Photographing actors, musicians and poets, he privileged a raw relationship with his subject, focusing on the emotional encounter between photographer and subject, and glorifying the accuracy of the instant (“All photos are accurate. None of them is the truth.”) by getting rid of all contextualizing elements and anything else that might draw attention away from the “geography of the face.”
He thus perfected his signature style, with the subject against a neutral background (white and sometimes gray in the 1950s, and then a stark, optical white as of the late 1960s) framed by the black border of the negative, expressing in an obvious, and radical, way his relationship with the photographic act. This relationship, according to Avedon, was not a means of approaching reality (although he found that could be “very interesting”), but of “taking and dealing with the surface of things,” and is currently spotlighted in the retrospective at the Jeu de Paume in Paris.
Avedon’s work was long-term, almost painstaking in its repetition, as can be seen in such series as In the American West, originally commissioned by the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. Dating from 1979 to 1984, the 752 portraits taken from some 17,000 rolls of film depict the photographer’s socially-neutral but aesthetically-intensive perspective, and are considered by some the highpoint of his career.
Large prints – harsh and (obviously) in black and white – are as surprisingly natural as they are delicately constructed; the viewer is entranced by the artist’s knack at capturing, in the blink of an eye, the entirety, and complexity, of his human subjects, revealing both what they wish to show of themselves and what they actually are.
Whether it be the melancholic depth of Marilyn Monroe captured in 1958, the disturbing symmetry between certain portraits from the In The American West series and that of Warhol’s Factory in 1967, or portraits of Christ-like miners, Avedon revealed ineffable, or even invisible, instants with an eternal brightness.
For more than 50 years, Richard Avedon was the photographer of disparity, flouting convention, and making him, along with his affection, intelligence and force, one of the leading-edge explorers of his time.
Tiphaine Kazi-Tani
Paris Palais de Tokyo, hosted in june an exhibition of Aleister Crowley’s paintings recently discovered near Cefalu in Italy where he founded his Abbaye of Thelema. Though Crowley the occultist is quite well known, we hardly know about Crowley’s work as a painter or a poet. On the occasion of this exceptional exhibition, the Palais de Tokyo welcomed cult American film director Kenneth Anger to have him introducing the exhibition and present there the film he directed in 2002 about Crowley on the last exhibition of his works in London The Man We Want to Hang. Kenneth Anger was largely nourished by Crowley’s work and no doubt that, even if he was a good friend of Anton Lavey who founded The Church of Satan, films like Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome (directly inspired by Crowley’s rituals), Invocation of my Demon Brother or Lucifer Rising owes more to Crowley’s Thelema than to LaVey’s vision of a Satanism taken metaphorically. No Nitzschean vision of a man with no God nor Master but a strong link with the symbols and fetishes of Crowley’s magical system which grew on middle east and Egyptian antique cultures. The works of and Anger and Crowley as a painter also share a certain number of artistic characteristics : flaming colors, the use of symbols without being symbolic at all and the huge influence they had of popular culture. Kenneth Anger defines himself as a magician and tells we are not supposed to believe him, the vision of his films dissipates all doubts about it.
Organised by the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek with the cooperation of the Richard Avedon Foundation, this exhibition surveys the whole of Richard Avedon’s career, starting with his first steps as a fashion photographer at the end of the Second World War.