AVEDON, Richard

About the American photographer, Richard AVEDON (1932-2004)

Richard AVEDON is one of the most important fashion photographers of the 20th century, and his imaginative design was groundbreaking. The child of Russian-Jewish immigrants, he studied with Alexey BRODOVICH in New York after serving in the military. He received his first assignment as a photographer from the photographer Lillian BASSMAN. From 1945 to 1965 he worked for the fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar, and from 1947 also for Vogue. In addition to fashion photography, he turned to portraiture, documenting, among others, protagonists of the U.S. civil rights movement in the southern states in 1963. His portraits were famous for the enormous frankness, the peak of this frankness he probably reached with a series about the slow death of his father. His purist style of the later years was characterized by working with a large-format camera, with which he photographed the sitters in front of a white canvas and without any other technical aids.

Photobooks by Richard AVEDON

'Observations' (1959); 'Nothing Personal' (1964); 'In View' (1969, 2017); 'Portraits' (1976, 2003); 'Photographs 1947-1977' (1978); 'In the American West' (1985, 1996, 2001); 'Hasselblad Award' (1991); 'An Autobiography' (1993); 'Evidence: 1944-1994' (1994); 'The Naked & The Dressed' (1998); 'The Sixties' (1999); 'Avedon at Work: In the American West' (2003); 'Woman in the Mirror' (2005); 'The Kennedys: Portrait of a Family' (2007); 'Photographs 1946-2004' (2007, 2014); 'Performance' (2008); 'Portraits of Power' (2008); 'Fashion 1944 - 2000' (2009); 'Murals and Portraits' (2014); 'Something Personal' (2017); 'Behind the Senes' (2019); 'Advertising' (2019); 'What Becomes a Legend Most: The Biography' (2020)