ON TOPIC: Say what you want about Richard Avedon but he raised the bar financially and artistically for every working photographer and artist. And his biography by Norma Stevens and Steven Aronson is a wonderful romp through high end art circles. And an insightful look at a master.

 

We all showed up for swim practice at eight this morning only to be greeted, right on the hour, by a huge flash of lightning and an enormous peal of thunder. The too near sudden flash of brilliant electricity was a profound motivator for clearing the pool of the seven a.m. swimmers who normally lollygag in the lanes after their workout. We often have to dive over them to start our own workouts. Not today. Nope. The seven a.m. crew hit the sweet spot, got their hour of swimming in, and then escaped to breakfast or work right on time. The threat of quick death at the hands of nature was quite a motivator. We eight o'clockers weren't so lucky. 

The rule of thumb is that we have to wait 25 minutes after the lightning or thunder for the "all clear." To get back in the pool. But we also collectively bring out our smartphones (not me, I don't carry one to practice) and huddle around looking at the app that tracks lightning strikes by their distance from us. The news didn't look good and one swimming influencer metaphorically tossed in the towel and headed back to her car. The rest of us caved and followed suit.

I muddled around the office all morning. I replaced the lost diopter on eyepiece of a Leica M240. I experimented with a small flash on an equally small Leica CL camera. I wrote several business letter for one of the non-photography businesses we own. I talked with B. about the bid to paint the exteriors of the house and the office and then, after lunch, with the weather still gloomy and unpredictable I decided to take the afternoon off entirely to sit in my favorite chair, next to a set of double doors that look out over one of the gardens in order to swill coffee and to continue my second reading of the above book about Richard Avedon's life, work and art. Damn. That man had incredible energy!

I've written about Avedon before. He's the reason I decided to pursue portraiture as a profession. I believe he was among the top five artists of all kinds in the 20th century. And beyond.

Some of you have commented when I mention Avedon's genius that you "hate" his work or that he was "just a fashion photographer" and I would say that you have horribly misjudged. Or you lack sufficient information.

The first time I laid eyes directly on a show of his prints was at the opening of his "In The American West" show at the Amon Carter Museum in Ft. Worth. That was the museum that initiated the entire project and at which the show premiered. The year was 1985. It's one thing to see the images from that show reproduced small (and usually poorly) in a printed magazine or on a website but I can assure you that it was another thing entirely to walk into a perfectly lit gallery in a first class museum and be confronted directly with a compelling image printed up to eight feet by ten feet on perfect photographic paper and mounted onto solid steel panels.

I had been working in darkrooms for years by that point and had also seen many portfolios by masters like Steiglitz and Steichen and Ansel Adams and Paul Strand. And when I say I "saw them" I mean I went to the fourth floor of the Humanities Research Center at UT Austin, in the depths of the Gernsheim Collection and had the exciting pleasure of museum curators handing me white, cotton gloves, inviting me to sit at a large table, and then to have them physically hand me print after vintage print for my own close and unhurried inspection. I was no virgin at the time when it came to looking at prints. 

But the Avedon show floored me. It was amazing. It was beyond comprehension for a working photographer like myself. Not just the quality painstakingly distilled from big 8x10 inch black and white negatives and printed to perfection, but also the content of the images themselves. There is a connection in the prints between the subject and the viewer that is so personal and so incisively seen that it made me hang up my camera for a while and recover my shattered ego by working (penance) in the advertising business again for a handful of years. 

And that same evening I got to meet Avedon and his team at the reception in the museum and he was magnificent. Shorter than me but charged with an energy that makes me jealous even today, some forty years later. 

Most people who haven't spent the time following the arc of Avedon's long and highly productive career tend to only know one part or another of his work and make a quick evaluation after looking at that one tiny corner, writ tiny, in a poorly printed substitute for the real prints, the real images. Or worse, having prints with almost unlimited detail reduced to 640 by 480 pixels on a crappy computer monitor. Or worse, a phone. 

It's like reading about a steak. Seeing a poorly printed picture of a steak, and deciding that you hate steak with all your heart even though you've never tasted one. Never eaten one. Never smelled one cooking. You just read a small article, looked at a photograph of some meat and then declared your ambivalence. Unaware that the steak was only a small part of a perfect feast...

Maybe you think fashion work is overrated and a ruinous construct of capitalism. Okay. So don't consider Avedon's groundbreaking work in fashion, done over the course of sixty years. Let's look at portraits and art and his nod to journalism. The reach and quality and diversity of his work has never been equalled and, given the trajectory of modern photography, probably never will be. 

But, since I don't have a financial stake in Avedon's work why the heck do I even care? It's because he set standards for himself as an artist, producer, photographer that we could consider emulating if we really want to achieve wonderful work. The hell with an audience. We should want to emulate his control, ability to be inspired, etc. in our own work even if our audience is just me. Ourselves. You. 

Every time I read this book I find something new that captivates me. In fact, I'll share one thing that I came to myself instinctively but which noted curator, Adam Gopnik, relates in an interview with the authors of the biography. He's discussing Avedon's workshops for aspiring, young photographers at his studio or at his house on Montauk. I'll let his words do the heavy lifting. Go Adam:

"Dick organized a fantastic weekend for the class at his Montauk place, where the assignment was for them to take portraits of each other. I have the one that someone or other did of me where I'm glaring and black-handed -- I was coming from the grill where I'd been roasting soft-shell crabs for the multitudes. For those three days Dick communicated --- hammered home--- his essential truth: that portraiture was not lighting or framing or anything but the exchange between two people, and that the portraits the students make would be exactly as good as the insight and empathy they possessed for each other. "Create a little theater of two-ness" was, I recall, a phrase of his that weekend. Of course, the delicate choreography of two-ness that was second nature to him-- approach, avoidance, seduction, and formality, with a necessary selfishness on the artist's part; it was his picture, after all -- wasn't something that was truly teachable. But he gave them at least a sense that composing the picture and pressing the shutter were the least essential things you did, and connecting with the subject -- in love, anger, appetite -- the most.

I try to embrace this idea in every portrait sitting that is meaningful to me. 

Avedon showed us over and over again that "artists" didn't have to mean "starving artists." That being photographers didn't mean you have to give up control to clients, editors and art directors. That even art bows a bit to the compounding of interest of time. That total ownership is also part of the core of true art. 

To say that you saw a photograph of Avedon's which made someone famous look "bad" and so you throw out the relevance of thousands and thousands of images across multiple genres is so simple minded as to be ---- disqualifying. 

Dive deeper into Avedon's work. And sit down and really read the book to understand just how much Avedon accomplished. You owe it to yourself to leap over whatever hurdles to appreciation that your younger self may have set up. There are prizes on the other side. And new awareness about photographing.

Just a few thoughts over coffee on a rainy day accented hour by hour by choruses of thunder interspersed with flashes of lightning. And, via this book, flashes of invention and genius which photographers should acknowledge. 

If you want to leave a comment basically just trashing Avedon, don't bother. It will get stricken. If you have something smart and insightful to share I'd love to read it even, EVEN if I don't agree with you. 

Thanks for getting this far.