“Avedon” Shows the Scars, Just Not the Photographer’s Own

In an archival clip from the nineteen-seventies, an interviewer asks Richard Avedon, the legendary photographer, about his portraits. The photos, the interviewer notes—which are often oversized, shot in stark black-and-white, with their subjects set against a blank, solid background—aren’t captioned with any identifying details. “It isn’t really important where they were photographed, or that one [person] is an author and the other is a politician,” Avedon says. “What interests me about the people I photograph is that they are connected by something else.” When pressed to name what that thing is, he pauses, then laughs, a little sheepishly. “You don’t want me to say the human condition, do you?” he responds.

As I watched this exchange, which is featured in “Avedon,” the new Netflix documentary directed by Ron Howard, it struck me that the photographer was being both honest and, perhaps, a little slippery about his work and its meaning. As one of the greatest portraitists of the twentieth century, up until his death, in 2004, Avedon was, indeed, omnivorous in his choice of subjects. He took pictures not just of authors and politicians but of actors, artists, activists, and socialites. He was also a top fashion photographer who, despite “making a lot of money shooting beautiful, elegant models,” as the art director Greg Wakabayashi puts it in the documentary, “could not stay away from the events of the time.” He became a committed chronicler of the marginal and the controversial, capturing Vietnamese napalm victims and residents of mental institutions, Texan oil-field workers and Oklahoma drifters.

I’m not sure whether it’s the case that, as the photographer claims, it didn’t matter who his subjects were. (It certainly mattered a great deal to many of them; getting shot by Avedon, the John Singer Sargent of his time, must have felt like a moment of professional and social wish-fulfillment.) But it’s true that these distinctions—between the famous and the anonymous, between the powerful and the powerless—became blurred once the picture was made. What mattered, then, and what ended up uniting Avedon’s subjects, wasn’t really the human condition, but the fact that, once photographed, they became Avedons, which is to say, stars. Caught in his lens, his protagonists became worthy of being looked at. They were made into celebrities, whether they were actual celebrities or not.

Richard Avedon, known as Dick, was a child of the Depression. He was born in New York City in the early nineteen-twenties; his father, a Russian Jewish dress-shop owner, lost his department store, Avedon’s Fifth Avenue, after the crash. As a student, Avedon was an underachiever, whose lacklustre academic performance belied his intense ambition. He enlisted in the U.S. Merchant Marine during the Second World War, and was tasked with taking photographs of new cadets for their I.D.s—shooting “a hundred thousand baffled faces,” all posed, in what would foretell his later work, in front of a plain background. After his discharge, in 1944, he set out to become a professional photographer, and went to study at the New School under Alexey Brodovitch, the influential former art director of Harper’s Bazaar. Brodovitch ended up hiring the young, charismatic Avedon at the magazine, not for his pictures but “because of his personality,” Brodovitch said. At Bazaar, Avedon swiftly rose through the ranks, working with the editors Carmel Snow and Diana Vreeland to capture the postwar fashion landscape. Sent to Paris to shoot Dior’s New Look, he was a naïf. “I knew nothing about the world I was sent to photograph, except what I had learned from Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movies,” he says in another old interview included in the documentary.

Quickly, however, he understood that, much like his childhood’s song-and-dance classics, photography was about creating a fantasy rather than capturing objective reality. (“Nobody cries in a Dior hat, Dick,” Snow admonished him, after Avedon shot a weeping model.) He learned, in his words, “how the world worked, how society worked, how money worked.” And he learned fast. He returned to Paris each season, pulling models out of the studio and shooting them in effervescent movement. But this apparent spontaneity never disturbed the photographs’ creation of what my colleague Vince Aletti recently called “Paris as a film set . . . where the women are beautiful and in love and even the bystanders are charmed.” Avedon developed such a recognizable style that, a little more than a decade hence, Astaire himself came to play a character that was based on him: Dick Avery, the fashion-photographer protagonist of Stanley Donen’s 1957 film “Funny Face.” In a remarkably short time, the photographer had become part of the romantic fantasy that he’d only so recently begun to create. With his signature heavy-framed glasses and leonine head of hair, his good watch and casually expensive clothes, Avedon had become Avedon.

There were deep-seated reasons for the photographer’s attraction to fantasy. For one, his family was troubled—his beautiful younger sister, Louise, who was an early muse of his, was mentally ill—but this darkness remained private, hidden under a pretty surface. “With skin like that, you don’t have to open your mouth,” Avedon’s mother used to tell her, and this focus on appearance rather than truth was practiced by the family more generally: cute dogs, for instance, were often borrowed and posed with in family photos, to give the Avedons a homier, happier sheen. As my colleague Hilton Als notes in the film, these were “real people—his family—living in a fiction. . . . The smoke-and-mirrors aspect of it was a tension that [Avedon] lived with as an artist.”

Howard’s film largely skims over some of the knottier aspects of Avedon’s life. His tortured bisexuality is entirely evaded, and his two unhappy marriages are only briefly addressed, as is his clearly difficult temperament. (At one moment, the model Beverly Johnson refers to him, diplomatically, as “high-strung,” and we see the briefest archival clip in which he snaps at a visitor on set.) When it comes to the actual photographs, however, the documentary’s cagy references to the shadowy underside of Avedon’s life begin to make a kind of sense, because his pictures, too, were conflicted about addressing that darkness. How does one treat blemishes and scars? In Avedon’s world, they were handled with a vise grip, making his pictures studies in utter control.

Avedon’s images—spare, sharply articulated, perfectly composed—do show their subjects’ rough edges. We see a pensive Marilyn Monroe looking a bit deflated, her sparkly halter top slack, as if drooping under the glamorous weight of its own sequins; a Texan teen-ager, a gutted snake held aloft between his two hands, his light apron stained with the reptile’s blood; Nancy Reagan’s gnarled, mottled fingers gripping her husband’s, giving the lie to her smooth, lifted face. And yet each of these disturbing elements, when thrown into crisp black-and-white relief, becomes iconic, larger than life. For a portrait of Andy Warhol, taken in 1969, the year after the attempt on the artist’s life by Valerie Solanas, Avedon photographed his bare torso, crisscrossed with scars whose geometric mapping parallels the lines of the leather jacket he’s wearing. But, while Warhol’s faceless form presents a shocking vision of injury and hurt, there’s also something almost sexy about it, its ruthless presentation a kind of dare: look at me, lifting up my shirt to show you.

Avedon, whose career spanned sixty years, from 1944 to 2004, was a man of his time. The quintessential twentieth-century photographer, he hopped between the commercial, artistic, and reportorial with an ease enabled by his era’s robust publishing landscape. As Tina Brown says at one point in the documentary, “Dick was a great magazine man.” (Brown, a onetime editor of The New Yorker, made Avedon the magazine’s first and, for a long time, only staff photographer, in 1992.) The ample production budgets and the wealth of print pages at the time allowed for the creation of a figure like Avedon, whose images had the aura of the outsized even when they were experienced in letter format. In our current, hyper-dispensable age of Instagram, in which images are scrolled past and immediately forgotten all day, every day, a figure like Avedon seems as if he belongs to an entirely different planet. As I watched the documentary, I kept thinking of a paraphrase of the well-known words of Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s 1950 film, “Sunset Boulevard.” Avedon and his work have remained big. It’s the pictures that got small. ♦