Wednesday, 15 January 2014

Richard Avedon

"In addition to his fashion photography, he was also well known for his portraiture. His black-and-white portraits were remarkable for capturing the essential humanity and vulnerability lurking in such larger-than-life figures " 

"One of the greatest photographers of the 20th century, Richard Avedon expanded the genre of photography with his surreal and provocative fashion photography as well as portraits that bared the souls of some of the most important and opaque figures in the world. Avedon was such a predominant cultural force that he inspired the classic 1957 film Funny Face, in which Fred Astaire's character is based on Avedon's life. While much has been and continues to be written about Avedon, he always believed that the story of his life was best told through his photographs. Avedon said, “Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me. My concern is… the human predicament; only what I consider the human predicament may simply be my own.”

biography.com


There isnt much else you can say about someone who is regarded so highly as Richard was. After reading the above I had to find out more as to why he was so great and if there was anything i could use to try in my next studio sessions after it all went a bit stale..This is what I found!

In 1957 Richard was to take a portrait of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor at the Waldorf Astoria in New York..the pre amble to the story is quite deathy/Hitlery and a bit heavy for my point so ill cut to the good bit..

"I would go every night to the casino in Nice and I watched them. I’d watch the way she was with him, the way he was with her, the way they were with people. I wanted to bring out the loss of humanity in them. Not the meanness – and there was a lot of meanness and a lot of narcissism – so that I knew exactly what I had to try accomplish during the sitting."


"I photographed them in their hotel suite in New York, and they had their pug dogs which they adored, and they had they’re Ladies Home Journal cover faces on. They were posing royally and nothing, not for a second, was anything that I’d observed when they were gambling presented to me. And I did a kind of… its like living by your wits. I knew they loved they’re dogs. And I said, ‘If I seem a little hesitant or a little disturbed it’s because my taxi ran over a dog.’ And both of their faces dropped because they loved dogs… a lot more than they loved Jews."



"The expression on their faces is true because you can’t evoke an expression that doesn’t come out of the life of the person."
– Richard Avedon speaking on his controversial 1957 portrait of the Windsors nearly forty years later


This,I had to try!

No comments:

Post a Comment