Famed photographer dies at 81

By Mary Rourke
Los Angeles Times

RICHARD AVEDON Avedon's specialty was black-and-white portraits such as this 1961 photo of Caroline Kennedy kissing her brother, John F. Kennedy Jr.

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Richard Avedon, who during a career spanning more than 50 years was renowned both for his stripped-down, black-and-white portrait photography and his playful yet sophisticated fashion shots, died yesterday in a San Antonio hospital of a blood clot in the brain.

Mr. Avedon, 81, had been on assignment in Texas for The New Yorker magazine completing a project called "On Democracy," a portfolio about politics in America. David Remnick, editor of the magazine, said he plans to publish the work before the Nov. 2 election.

As a fashion photographer, Mr. Avedon was among the first to replace the statuesque poses of the past with vivacious action scenes that commanded the pages of Harper's Bazaar and Vogue magazines from the mid-1940s through the 1980s. His models nuzzled elephants in Egypt, hugged sweaty cyclists on the Champs-Élysées in Paris and leapt like gymnasts through his New York studio.

But he increasingly preferred making portraits of public figures, capturing their inner worlds rather than romanticizing their lifestyles. By eschewing soft lights and cluttered props, he took a stark, often-harsh look at his subjects. Many photographs taken later in his life were done for The New Yorker, which published his portraits of people in the arts and politics as a weekly feature starting in 1992.

	RICHARD AVEDON "Ronald Fischer, beekeeper," was taken by Richard Avedon in May 1981 in Davis, Calif.

"Avedon gave us the pared-down study of the famous person, a stripped-away look at their humanity," Arthur Ollman, director of the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, said in an interview this year. "It is portraiture as interrogation."

Actors, presidents, writers and social activists stood against a blank white background "as if he had pinned them to a wall like a specimen," Ollman said of Mr. Avedon's style. The results could be cold and critical. Yet, Ollman said, "being photographed by Avedon meant you'd made it."

Marilyn Monroe, dressed in sequins and diamonds, appears to be a bit frightened before Mr. Avedon's camera. President Ford squints warily in a 1976 portrait that suggests an honest if uninspired CEO. Playwright Samuel Beckett gazes into the camera, seemingly at peace with his demons.

Mr. Avedon's eye-to-eye stance regarding his subjects sometimes was compared to German photographer August Sander, who, as the Nazis were rising to power, documented farmers, preachers and others as if they were endangered species.

Mr. Avedon once described what he saw in many of the famous faces he photographed.

"People — running from unhappiness, hiding in power — are locked within their reputations, ambitions, beliefs," he wrote in "An Autobiography, Richard Avedon" about his portraits of such tenacious survivors as Kennedy family matriarch Rose Kennedy and writer Truman Capote.

Other images in the book — of war victims and mental patients — spoke to a different kind of portrait. "People, unprotected by their roles, become isolated in beauty and intellect and illness and confusion," he wrote.

Mr. Avedon found his means of artistic expression early and was among the first to adapt it to larger-than-life-sized portraits — 4-by-6-feet images in the late 1950s, 10-by-30-feet or more in the '60s.

"In art, the monumental size generally had been reserved for gods and presidents," Robert Sobieszek, curator of photography at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, said yesterday. "Avedon applied it to everyone, from Andy Warhol to ordinary workers in the American West. What he pulled off was the democratization of the photographic image."

He was attracted to stylish rebels. College student Julian Bond and other civil-rights activists stand in formation like an army before Mr. Avedon's camera; Warhol and his entourage amble across a three-panel mural; the bearded, bell-bottomed "Chicago Seven" anti-war activists — including Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Tom Hayden — look ready to rap.

"Avedon's photographs are unrivaled as documents of our time," said Mia Fineman, research associate of the photography department of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. "He created an encyclopedia of the key players in the counterculture, the intellectual culture, politics and the arts."

Throughout most of his career, his fascination with street photography and news shots edged its way into his fashion work. Mr. Avedon didn't invent the tabloid-fashion shoot or hold the monopoly.

Helmut Newton's fashion "stories" were blatantly erotic; Guy Bourdin created surreal scenes. And, as lesser talents tried their hand at it, the "stories" frequently upstaged the designer goods in the picture. Mr. Avedon managed to keep a balance.

"With Dick Avedon you always knew you were looking at a fashion photograph," said Grace Mirabella, editor of Vogue at the time the photographer landed a record $1 million annual contract there in 1966. "He never tried to forsake style for a strong image."

Born in New York on May 15, 1923, Mr. Avedon was the only son of Jacob Isaac Avedon, a Russian Jewish immigrant who owned a women's clothing store on Fifth Avenue but lost it in the 1929 stock-market crash. His mother, Anna, taught him about style and the arts. The image-conscious Mr. Avedon borrowed handsome dogs to pose with them in family photographs.

But home life was not the perfect world of the family pictures, Mr. Avedon later said. His father was critical and remote. His younger sister Louise was a schizophrenic who spent nearly 10 years in mental institutions before dying at age 42.

Mr. Avedon took photographs from the time he was a child. After high school, he joined the Merchant Marine, where for two years he took photos for identification cards — an experience, he said later, that was important to his future work.

He later entered the design program at the New School for Social Research in New York. His teacher, Alexey Brodovitch, also was art director for Harper's Bazaar, and Mr. Avedon became a staff photographer for the magazine in 1945.

Mr. Avedon married Dorcas "Doe" Nowell in 1944; they divorced five years later. He married Evelyn Franklin in 1951, with whom he had a son, John, before the couple separated.

"What happened is, I'm married to my work," he once told People magazine.

His son and several grandchildren survive him.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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