Richard Avedon (May 15, 1923 – October 1, 2004) was an American ...

Richard Avedon (May 15, 1923 – October 1, 2004) was an Americanphotographer. Avedon was able to take his early success in fashionphotography and expand it into the realm of fine art.Avedon was born in New York City to a Jewish-Russian family. Afterbriefly attending Columbia University, he started as a photographer forthe Merchant Marines in 1942, taking identification pictures of thecrewmen with his Rolleiflex camera given to him by his father as a goingawaypresent. In 1944, he began working as an advertisingphotographer for a department store, but was quickly discovered byAlexey Brodovitch, the art director for the fashion magazine Harper'sBazaar.In 1946, Avedon had set up his own studio and began providingimages for magazines including Vogue and Life. He soon became thechief photographer for Harper's Bazaar. Avedon did not conform to thestandard technique of taking fashion photographs, where models stoodemotionless and seemingly indifferent to the camera. Instead, Avedonshowed models full of emotion, smiling, laughing, and, many times, inaction.In 1966, Avedon left Harper's Bazaar to work as a staffphotographer for Vogue magazine. In addition to his continuing fashionwork, Avedon began to branch out and photographed patients of mentalhospitals, the Civil Rights Movement in 1963, protesters of the VietnamWar, and the fall of the Berlin Wall.During this period Avedon also created two famous sets of portraits ofThe Beatles. The first, taken in mid to late 1967, became one of the firstmajor rock poster series, and consisted of five striking psychedelicportraits of the group — four heavily solarised individual colour portraits(solarisation of prints by his assistant, Gideon Lewin, retouching by BobBishop) and a black-and-white group portrait taken with a Rolleiflexcamera and a normal Planar lens. The next year he photographed themuch more restrained portraits that were included with The White Albumin 1968.Avedon was always interested in how portraiture captures thepersonality and soul of its subject. As his reputation as a photographer

ecame widely known, he brought in many famous faces to his studioand photographed them with a large-format 8x10 view camera. Hisportraits are easily distinguished by their minimalist style, where theperson is looking squarely in the camera, posed in front of a sheer whitebackground. Among the many rock bands photographed by Avedon, in1973 he shot Electric Light Orchestra with all the members exposingtheir bellybuttons for recording, On the Third Day.He is also distinguished by his large prints, sometimes measuring overthree feet in height. His large-format portrait work of drifters, miners,cowboys and others from the western United States became a bestsellingbook and traveling exhibit entitled In the American West, and isregarded as an important hallmark in 20th Century portrait photography,and by some as Avedon's magnum opus. Commissioned by the AmonCarter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, it was a six-year project Avedonembarked on in 1979, that produced 125 portraits of people in theAmerican west who caught Avedon's eye.Avedon was drawn to working people such as miners and oil fieldworkers in their soiled work clothes, unemployed drifters, and teenagersgrowing up in the West circa 1979-84. When first published andexhibited, In the American West was criticized for showing what someconsidered to be a disparaging view of America. Avedon was also laudedfor treating his subjects with the attention and dignity usually reservedfor the politically powerful and celebrities. Laura Wilson served asAvedon's assistant during the creation of In the American West and in2003 published a photo book documenting the experiences, Avedon atWork, In the American West.Avedon became the first staff photographer for The New Yorker in1992. He has won many awards for his photography, including theInternational Center of Photography Master of Photography Award in1993, the Prix Nadar in 1994 for his photobook Evidence, and the RoyalPhotographic Society 150th Anniversary Medal in 2003. In 1944,Avedon married Dorcas Nowell, who later became a model and wasknown professionally as Doe Avedon. Nowell and Avedon divorced afterfive years of marriage.In 1951, he married Evelyn Franklin; their marriage produced oneson, John. Avedon and Franklin also later divorced.Martial arts movie star Loren Avedon is the nephew of Richard Avedon.On October 1, 2004, he suffered a brain hemorrhage in San Antonio,Texas while shooting an assignment for The New Yorker. At the time ofhis death, Avedon was working on a new project titled On Democracy tofocus on the run-up to the 2004 U.S. presidential election.Hollywood presented a fictional account of his early career in the1957 musical Funny Face, starring Fred Astaire as the fashionphotographer "Dick Avery." Avedon supplied some of the stillphotographs used in the production, including its most famous singleimage: an intentionally overexposed close-up of Audrey Hepburn's face

in which only her famous features - her eyes, her eyebrows, and hermouth - are visible.Hepburn was Avedon's muse in the 1950s and 60s, going as far tosay "I am, and forever will be, devastated by the gift of Audrey Hepburnbefore my camera. I cannot lift her to greater heights. She is alreadythere. I can only record. I cannot interpret her. There is no going furtherthan who she is. She has achieved in herself her ultimate portrait."Erwin Blumenfeld was a renowned photographer whose work is situated between1930 and 1969. He was born in Berlin on 26 January 1897, moved to Holland late1918, and started a professional career in photography in 1934. He moved toFrance in 1936. From 1937 to 1939, he published in and Harper's Bazaar. Whenthe Second World War broke out, he was interned in French camps as an alien, butwas eventually allowed to leave for New York in 1941. He became a US citizen in1946. His more personal work is in black and white; his commercial work in fashion,much for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, is mostly in color. In both media he was agreat innovator. In black and white he did all his work personally in the dark room.In color he drew on his extensive background in classical and modern painting. Hemarried Lena Citroen in Holland in 1921 and had three children there: Lisette,Henry Alexander and Frank Yorick. He died in Rome on July 4th, 1969.For details of his life one should read his picaresque autobiography, which he wrotein German and on which he worked from 1955 till 1969. It has been published inGerman under the title: Einbildungsroman, Eichborn Verlag, 1998. It also has comeout in English under the title: Eye to I, Thames and Hudson, 1999. It was firstpublished in French under the title: Jadis et Daguerre, Robert Laffont, 1975, with are-edition by Editions de la Martinière, 1996. It also has come out in Dutch:Spiegelbeeld, Uitgeverij de Harmonie, 1980. There were several earlier Germaneditions under the title: Durch tausendjährige Zeit.

Peter Lindbergh Biography1944 Born on the Polish border of East Germany1973 Completed two year apprenticeship with photographer, Hans Lux1978S tern Magazine published his first fashion series of photographs; moves to Paris.