Richard Avedon - Photographer

[helena]

love the shrimpton pics softgrey - that look is much copied - did avedon do it first?

 

[Pink Panta]

[size=+5] I know this is not about this topic but i need help with my avatar i cant get it to the size i need. PLEASE SOMEBODY!!!:ANGRY:

 

[softgrey]

hello pink panta...
perhaps if you post inthe appropriate place someone will be able to help you...
http://www.thefashionspot.com/forums/showthread.php?p=584064


welcome to tfs...btw...

 

[softgrey]

love the shrimpton pics softgrey - that look is much copied - did avedon do it first?

hi helena..i love that editorial too...it looks so modern to me...
it's hard for me to say who did what first anymore...everytime i think i've found the origin...i then find something even earlier...

i do know that avedon was greatly influenced by louise dahl-wolfe and that she was a pioneer with colour...so maybe it came from there...??

these look hand-painted to me...

 

[helena]

yes it does look hand painted....which I am sure they don't do anymore with all the modern gagets etc the clothes & the photos do look very modern (marni-esque)

 

[Pink Panta]

Thanks Softgrey:d

 

[softgrey]

yes it does look hand painted....which I am sure they don't do anymore with all the modern gagets etc the clothes & the photos do look very modern (marni-esque)

i assume that all effects are done on the computer now...
i love all the clothes...and jean shrimpton is remarkable as well...

 

[hugobossdaria]

wow,he was a great photographer

 

[Atelier]

From today's WWD:

AVEDON'S WOMEN: The new Richard

Avedon Foundation will announce its first project today, a book called "Woman in the Mirror," which is a collection of the late photographer's portraits of women including Marilyn Monroe, model Suzy Parker and subjects he shot for his "In the American West" series. Abrams will publish the book in November.

The Avedon Foundation, based in Manhattan at the Museum of Modern Art's offices, is also collaborating on several upcoming exhibitions of the photographer's work. The Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Tex., responsible for commissioning "In the American West," will host a reprise of the show in September, which will then travel to San Francisco and Tucson. Also in the planning stages are a retrospective at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Norway that will be continuing on to Paris, London and the U.S.; an exhibit called "Portraits of Power" at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and gallery shows in New York and San Francisco.
— S.J.

 

[softgrey]

thank atelier...didn't know there was an avedon foundation established...
glad to hear it...

 

[DosViolines]

Defining Beauty Through Avedon - NYTimes article

source: nytimes.com

Defining Beauty Through Avedon

By PHILIP GEFTER
Published: September 18, 2005


RICHARD AVEDON honored women. For nearly half a century, taking photographs for the top two fashion magazines in the world, Harper's Bazaar and Vogue, women were the subject and the target of his insistent, yet sympathetic gaze. From the models in his fashion tableaux to his later, unembellished portraits of artists, writers, intellectuals, socialites and hardscrabble workers in the American West, his regard for the fully realized individual remained constant.


Courtesy of the Richard Avedon Foundation
DOVIMA
Paris in 1950.

At first, Avedon practiced taking fashion pictures of his beautiful younger sister, Louise, and throughout "Woman in the Mirror" (Abrams), a new collection of Avedon's pictures, that respectful posture turns all women into the potential sister - an undeniably beautiful, but deeply kindred spirit. There is an erotic component to some of these pictures, but he seems less concerned with men's arousal than with the subtle cues women take from one another, a view that places sexuality in a larger constellation of human qualities.

After being discovered by Alexey Brodovitch, the art director of Harper's Bazaar, Avedon began taking photographs for the magazine in 1947, the year Dior introduced the New Look and just two years before Simone de Beauvoir's "Second Sex" was published. The New Look was modernity incarnate and the sculptural lines and cosmopolitan flourishes were perfect for Avedon, who seized upon it to make cinematic images in which the models inhabited the clothes like characters in a movie. And, as if Simone de Beauvoir were looking over his shoulder, Avedon's photography animated women with spirit and determination.

Through Avedon's eyes, female beauty is not viewed with distrust, as a collection of wiles and veils that can manipulate, obfuscate or seduce. In one photograph, the model Liz Pringle stands effortlessly poised in a boat, with the manner of an heiress in a breezy movie from the 1950's. She holds a cigarette and looks our way with the sly grin of a secret shared, as if we are among her closest friends. You know the picture is all about the clothes, but the soignée sophistication of the scene is what draws you in.

He had many muses, among them Dovima, whose name alone conjures an exotic creature of myth. (In fact, Dorothy Virginia Margaret Juba created her name from the first two letters of each of her given names.) In one Avedon picture, she wears a dress by Jacques Fath, and it appears as something sacred and ceremonial, Dovima assuming the stature of a pageant queen.

His photograph of Penelope Tree is as much a portrait of the real society girl as it is a model wearing the latest fashion. The pants suit was a new concept at the time, the bell bottom an emerging style; his picture is playful and free-spirited, and she strikes a Pippi Longstocking note - unconventional but all grown up, cosmopolitan and top-of-the-moment, out in the world on her own terms.

And his portrait of the writer Renata Adler is stripped of decoration, leaving the anatomy of her face, the intransigence of her posture and the gravity of her braid to represent a modern-day Athena, goddess of the intellect, taking our measure as much as we take hers.

"Dick had a very particular taste for what he thought was a beautiful woman," said Norma Stevens, executive director of the Richard Avedon Foundation. Paging through the book in her New York office, she stopped at a portrait of a seemingly downtrodden young woman from his series "In the American West." "To him, Debbie McClendon's fragility and tenderness resembled a Botticelli."

Movie history has permanently married Richard Avedon to Audrey Hepburn thanks to "Funny Face," starring Fred Astaire as the fashion photographer Dick Avery, who is based on Avedon. In the book, "Richard Avedon: Made in France," Judith Thurman writes that "Funny Face" is an artifact of a remote, lost civilization. Three of its purest pleasures have not dated: Hepburn's face, Givenchy's couture, and Astaire's dancing - all pertinent, the dancing, in particular, to Avedon's work.

She equates Astaire's buoyancy to Avedon's pictures, the classical discipline with which the dancer, like the photographer, made the artificial and rehearsed seem effervescent and spontaneous.

Avedon distilled a variety of elements into a simple and distinct visual signature: the element of surprise, for example, in his most famous picture of Dovima with the elephants at the Cirque d'Hiver in Paris, the large, bulbous creatures forming a backdrop of unharnessed animal instinct against which the elegance of high fashion stands in dramatic relief. Or glamour in his picture of Sunny Harnett, the top model in her day, at a posh European casino; he made her shimmer like a Hitchcock blonde in a Madame Grès dress. Or wit in his picture of Carmen stepping off the ground, as if by wearing a Pierre Cardin coat you, too, could be walking on air.

He played a stunning hand with visual onomatopoeia as well: his portrait of Katharine Hepburn with her mouth opened elicits the very sound of her distinctive accent; his portrait of Louise Nevelson, with her heavy eyeliner and sculptural jewelry, turns her into one of her own works of art; and his portrait of Marella Agnelli, in which her elongated neck conjures Modigliani, her entire form as graceful as a Brancusi.

Despite decades of imitators, Avedon has proved inimitable. His curiosity fueled his imagination. He anticipated the tone of each era with a sophistication that was precision-cut in the stratosphere of art, fashion and culture at which he so naturally, and tenaciously, hovered. He never stopped experimenting with the photographic image and, always, his pictures reflect a regard for women that was truly debonair.

Images from same source:

[font=Arial, Helvetica, San Serif][size=-1]Courtesy the Richard Avedon Foundation[/size][/font]

[font=Arial, Helvetica, San Serif][size=-1]LIZ PRINGLE
Jamaica in February 1959.[/size][/font]

[font=Arial, Helvetica, San Serif][size=-1]Courtesy of the Richard Avedon Foundation[/size][/font]

[font=Arial, Helvetica, San Serif][size=-1]DOVIMA
Paris in 1950.[/size][/font]

[font=Arial, Helvetica, San Serif][size=-1]Courtesy of the Richard Avedon Foundation[/size][/font]

[font=Arial, Helvetica, San Serif][size=-1]LOUISE AVEDON
New York in 1941.[/size][/font]

[font=Arial, Helvetica, San Serif][size=-1]Courtesy of the Richard Avedon Foundation[/size][/font]

[font=Arial, Helvetica, San Serif][size=-1]
[/size][/font]

 

[Estella*]

thanks for the article and pictures dosviolines
there was also an article about his 'last book' in german vogue, it contains amazing images: 'woman in the mirror'
picture from amazon.com

 

[DosViolines]

source:[FONT=arial,sans-serif][SIZE=-1]audreyhepburnlibrary.com

Harper's Bazaar (May, 1957)




Cosmopolitan (February, 1957)



I've also posted both editorials in the Audrey Hepburn thread
[/SIZE][/FONT]

 

[Estella*]

^lovely, thank you

 

[Avant Garde]

http://s2.supload.com/free/111103058_faa1aa60a2_b-20060311223416.jpg/view/

Old bazaar article, scanned by me Nov. 2005

 

[Whitelinen]

Thanks for the pictures.

Avedon had a style of photographing others lack...I love the contrast in his work.

 

[Miss Dalloway]

The first time i saw a photograph by Richard Avedon was when i was on summer breaks at my grandmothers house,i was nine years old and was training ballet and was obssesed with ballet!So my grandmother was telling me how she seen Rudolf Nurejev performing in Paris and all about him.I was very impressed by the story so she allowed me to look at her Vogue(something my mother never permitted-because she thought it was not for children) i cant remember wich Vogue it was,probably french or american.In vogue was an article about Rudolf N.along with the photographs by R.Avedon and they took my breath away.Photos were simply beautiful showing him as a dancer in the air and aa a man revealing his muscular torso!Many years later i still remember the pictuers and also now i know the photographer.That was the magic of R.Avedon he knew how to make you remember his photos!And i sure did!

 

[Bellissima]

Just wanted to add some images by this iconic photographer

http://www.staleywise.com/past_exhibitions.html

 

[Josephine]

^those photos are really beautiful, in particular the second last - so wistful and romantic

 

[Whitelinen]

That elephant photo is my favourite of his