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Photographer Richard Avedon has become our poet laureate of portraiture. Unlike fashion photographs, most of Avedon’s portraits were not initiated by commercial assignments but by personal conviction. Each is a virtuoso reckoning with human complexities.
To some viewers, Avedon’s signature white-background portrait style, with its sharp clarity and unforgiving light, may seem difficult or astringent. In his refusal to flatter or idealize, he carries on a tradition of unflinching naturalism that began with fifteenth-century Dutch masters and shares with them an abiding humanism and a clear-eyed commitment to the physical realities of this world.
Avedon’s portrait work constitutes a modern-day pantheon of many of the major artistic, intellectual, and political figures of the late twentieth-century, and, as such, it belongs to the time-honored tradition of public portraiture.