Richard Avedon’s Defining Early Fashion Shoots
Richard Avedon was twenty-one years old, fresh out of the Merchant Marine, with only a handful of portraits of fellow-soldiers to show, when Alexey Brodovitch, the already legendary (and famously difficult) art director of Harper’s Bazaar, hired him, in 1944. Looking back later, Avedon said that Brodovitch “was immediately, for me, the authority, the teacher, the father.” Bazaar was his education. He learned there not just to submit to the intimate and often ruthlessly collaborative process of putting together a monthly magazine but to thrive under it—to master it and make it work for him.
The results are extraordinary. Brodovitch told his students and Bazaar’s contributors to “Astonish me!” Avedon clearly took that mandate to heart. The new book “Richard Avedon: The Harper’s Bazaar Years” (Abrams) collects the work he made for the magazine in the course of more than two decades. Edited by Laura Avedon, the photographer’s daughter-in-law, and James Martin, the director of the Richard Avedon Foundation, it includes many familiar images—“Dovima with Elephants,” Suzy Parker on roller skates, Paul McCartney in a NASA spacesuit—plus a slew of variants, outtakes, and behind-the-scenes shots, many showing Avedon at work. Even if the variations are subtle—a tilt of the head, a casual gesture—the sense that we’re not seeing familiar material recycled gives the project spark and substance. This is not a recap of Avedon’s early talents but a rediscovery.
Going into Bazaar, Avedon made a conscious break from the neoclassical style of George Hoyningen-Huene, Horst P. Horst, and Cecil Beaton, all of whom looked especially dated after the war. Louise Dahl-Wolfe, who had a lock on the magazine’s photographic covers and all of its coverage of Paris collections, had mostly retreated to the studio, where she fell back on props and blown-up graphics. Avedon wanted to be outside, where the energy of the street kept him excited and on edge. He was the perfect fit for a magazine that, under Brodovitch and Carmel Snow, the editor-in-chief, had already embraced the international avant-garde, with covers by Jean Cocteau, Saul Steinberg, and Leonor Fini and photographic spreads by Brassaï, Man Ray, Bill Brandt, Lisette Model, and Henri Cartier-Bresson.
Once Avedon was allowed to work with the Paris collections, in 1947, he began, issue after sensational issue, to transform the fashion photograph. From early on, his work was distinguished by a sense of pleasure in the process. No matter how controlled the setup, there was always room for improvisation, for spontaneity. He didn’t just take models out of the studio, he gave them a world to make-believe in and a narrative that, however loosely constructed, carried them through cinematic spreads of up to twenty pages. In a city still struggling to recover from war and occupation, he introduced his models—and Bazaar’s readers—to Paris as a film set: glamorous, luxurious, sophisticated, sublime. No rude reality intrudes on Avedon’s dream city, where the women are beautiful and in love and even the bystanders are charmed.
“There’s something about fashion that has to do with aesthetic social climbing,” Avedon said much later, with Snow and the brilliant if high-handed editor Diana Vreeland on his mind. (He called Vreeland “a genius and a megalomaniac. . . . the enemy except that she was the source of the greatest inspiration.” There may have been little place for critique in his early images of the luxe life, but their satirical edge sharpened over time, hitting a peak in a spoof of tabloid sensationalism in the September, 1962, issue. Casting Mike Nichols and Suzy Parker as Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, stalked by the paparazzi during the making of “Cleopatra,” Avedon teased our obsession with celebrity and scandal without losing sight of the latest in Paris fashion.
As with Irving Penn at Vogue, Avedon’s range of subjects reflected an insatiable appetite for the culture at large: Carson McCullers, Pearl Bailey, Marian Anderson, Bob Dylan, Jasper Johns, Brigitte Bardot, Gloria Vanderbilt, Rudolf Nureyev, Judy Garland, Coleman Hawkins. Whether he saw these figures at home, in their dressing rooms, or against his stark-white studio backdrop, Avedon brought a sense of curiosity and concern to his portraits. His genuine interest in his subjects gave them the space to express themselves—to withdraw or emote or simply meet his attention and intensity with their own.
In recollections from his time at Bazaar printed at the back of the book, Avedon talks about the essential function of a fashion photo. “I couldn’t do a photograph of a new coat from Balenciaga without in some way heightening what his contribution was in that collection. . . . The dedication was first to the clothes.” Whether the photo was staged at Maxim’s or around the pinball machine in a neighborhood bar, Avedon conjured a sense of delight in the moment. The atmosphere was expressionist, a swirl of lights twinkling out of focus, but the gowns were seen in detail, their construction—the waist, the décolletage, the petal-like layering on a Dior skirt—so carefully lit that a clever dressmaker could make an accurate copy just from the picture on the page. “I do it automatically now,” Avedon said of his close attention to the craft of couture, “without ever having to think about it.” The great innovator of fashion photography, the revolutionary, was also a strict traditionalist.
Just before he left Bazaar, Avedon edited and took every fashion and editorial photograph for the April, 1965, issue, commemorating his twentieth anniversary at the magazine not with a retrospective but with a celebration of the hyper-pop sixties moment. The let’s-put-on-a-show energy and enthusiasm on display in its pages is hard to resist. The romantic expressionism of his Paris-collections work had been replaced by a sharper, crisper style of images, many of them set in the studio, and the mood was playful. The photographs that appeared on a contributor’s page were taken in a photo booth. Other pages were solarized or collaged. The models frugged, put on NASA spacesuits, and posed in Claes Oldenburg’s bedroom suite. Marella Agnelli shared a spread with the teen-age basketball phenom Lew Alcindor (soon to be known as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar). Brodovitch left the magazine in 1958; two successors had already come and gone, and the new art directors, Ruth Ansel and Bea Feitler, were young assistants who’d been promoted. They proved to be the ideal collaborators for what became a historic edition of the magazine—as critical to Avedon’s bibliography as any of his books.
Avedon went to Vogue in 1966, where Vreeland, as editor-in-chief, and Alex Liberman, who was then the editorial director, were turning out one of the period’s great magazines. When Vreeland’s extravagance proved too much for Condé Nast, she was let go, in 1971. Avedon stayed on with her replacement, Grace Mirabella, sharing space in the magazine’s pages with Penn, Helmut Newton, Deborah Turbeville, Duane Michals, Horst, and a large, impressive cast of others who would outlast him when Anna Wintour arrived, in 1988. Then Avedon became the first and, for a long time, the only staff photographer at this magazine. He was still very much at work when he died on assignment for The New Yorker, in 2004, at the age of eighty-one. But, in a lifetime of work, his photographs for Harper’s Bazaar remain definitive. They’re classic Avedon—the first pictures that come to mind when his name is mentioned, and in many cases the best.
