Doe Avedon

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Photograph by Richard Avedon at the Gare du Nord, Paris, August 1947. Doe Avedon, model and actress, and the inspiration – along with Richard Avedon, her first husband – for the movie Funny Face, died last week at the age of 86.

Funny Face trailer

In 1949 Doe divorced Richard Avedon to marry Dan Matthews, an actor. “I would have crawled to the Bronx on my knees to bring Doe back,” Mr. Avedon said in 1993.

Book photo above from the excellent must-have Avedon Fashion 1944–2000.

Image of the Day

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Richard Avedon: Christmas Boy, 1965
(via Steven Kasher Gallery/1stDibs)

Elizabeth Taylor

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Elizabeth Taylor, 1964, photographed by Richard Avedon

Ego Trïp

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Covers of the Paris-based fashion magazine Egoïste – published intermittently since 1977 by founder and editor Nicole Wisniak.

Back issues, with photography by Helmut Newton, Richard Avedon, Paolo Roversi, to name a few, go for hundreds on eBay.

The first issue since 2007 is due out next month and I'm sure it will go quickly – I will definitely be on the hunt.

Read more about Egoïste in a recent article at nytimes.com.

Image of the Day

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Kyle Johnson was shooting in our studio this morning and told me about this Richard Avedon photo, which I don't think I've ever seen:

Richard Avedon: Martin Luther King, Jr. with his father and son, Atlanta, Georgia, March 22, 1963

Today's Fresh Air features a fascinating interview with Clarence B. Jones, who wrote what came to be known as King's "I Have A Dream" speech, delivered at the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington, in the same year the photo above was taken. Click here to listen.

Darkness and Light

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Photographer Richard Avedon in front of a portrait from his In the American West series

I recently came across a PBS American Masters documentary on Richard Avedon, posted in its entirety on YouTube:


There is often speculation that on some level all of Avedon's photos are self-portraits – that he was always trying to get to some truth about himself by photographing other people. I think because of that, there is something about his work, taken as a whole, that to me represents life so fully – the good and the bad, the ugliness and the promise of beauty, the reality and the aspiration – the mix of it all. It kind of kills me to think about it, his work means so much to me.

This documentary is a good survey – part 1 of 9 is above [or if you can't see it, click here to watch] and parts 2–9 are after the jump:

The Message is the Medium

I found this book last Friday at Twice Sold Tales in Seattle. Not like it's the greatest find ever, but the cover caught my eye and it turns out the photo is by Richard Avedon.

There are some other cool and/or funny photos inside (click to enlarge).

(Oddly enough, if you read the captions, Free is referred to as a "she," plausibly to subvert the sexual power structure.)


Revolution for the Hell Of It is also full of various wisdom nuggets, such as:

I concur, Marshall McLuhan.

All in all a good find.

Image of the Day

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Doe Avedon at the Gare du Nord, Paris, August 1947.

Photography by Richard Avedon, from the book Avedon Fashion 1944–2000, which accompanied the recent Avedon exhibition at the International Center of Photography in New York. Emily gave it to me for my birthday and it made me really happy – it's a big, beautifully designed book featuring essays by ICP curator Carol Squiers, Vince Aletti, and photography historian Philippe Garner, and 245 of Avedon's most iconic fashion photographs.

I posted about the ICP exhibition here and here, and Emily and I had a chance to see it last time we were in New York, right before it closed. Actually, we scheduled our trip with that in mind – we were really looking forward to seeing it, and I'm glad to say that the show did not disappoint in the least.

Looking at photography online and in books is great, no doubt, but seeing printed work in person can be a very moving experience. Visiting ICP is almost always first on my list of things to do with free time in New York.

The current show is Dress Codes, ICP's third triennial of contemporary photography and video, running through January 17, 2010. Visit icp.org for more info.

More Avedon

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"Avedon took Munkacsi’s use of motion and literally ran with it…[His models] dance, leap or lope past, often completely obscured by flowing garments. Movement could also be disintegration: in a 1994 photograph, Stephanie Seymour is shown crumpling like a marionette whose strings have been cut."

Roberta Smith reviews Avedon Fashion 1944–2000 in today's paper:

Avedon’s fashion photographs from the late 1940s to the early ’60s are everything you want great art to be: exhilarating, startlingly new and rich enough with life and form to sustain repeated viewings. Their beauty is joy incarnate and contagious. The best of them are as perfect on their own terms as the best work of Jackson Pollock or Jasper Johns from that era, and as profoundly representative of it.

As with these painters Avedon’s work represents an important turning point and a new kind of self-consciousness of his medium. He makes us aware of its process on different levels, while also questioning its values and deflating its pretensions. His images have a new tautness; you see them as energy-producing wholes in which every detail and bit of surface is articulated. Like Abstract Expressionist painting, they show us an art form learning from and then moving beyond European conventions.

Read the rest of Roberta Smith's review here.

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The New Yorker also has a slideshow online featuring 15 images from the show (Avedon was a staff photographer there in the last years of his life).

Dovima with Sacha, cloche and suit by Balenciaga, Café des Deux Magots, Paris, August 1955. Photography Richard Avedon. Cathy Horyn, paraphrasing part of a 1958 New Yorker article on Avedon and his frequent subject: "Dovima was a devout Catholic and a homebody who traveled on shoots with her husband and a suitcase full of comic books. She was Dorothy Horan. Dovima was a blend of “Do” for Dorothy, “vi” for victory, and “ma” for her ma."

Visionary Visuals

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Donyale Luna (the first black model ever to appear on the cover of British Vogue) in Paco Rabanne, 1966. Photography Richard Avedon

In an extended multimedia slideshow on the New York Times website, co-curators Vince Aletti and Carol Squires speak about Avedon Fashion 1944–2000, which opens tomorrow at the International Center of Photography, and runs through September 6th. Click here to listen.

Also a must: highly esteemed fashion writer Cathy Horyn reviews the show in today's paper.

Simply put, Richard Avedon was a national treasure – someone who explored a multitude of directions in photography, and through his work made the world a better place to be on so many levels. I am dying to see the show as soon as I can make the trip.

Muses in the Museum

"To deal with the crowds following Twiggy during her first shoot in New York, in 1967, the photographer Melvin Sokolsky had hand masks made of her image for the fans to hold up on cue. It was a way both to acknowledge Twiggy’s celebrity and avoid seeing other faces."

In today's New York Times (nope, haven't canceled yet) Cathy Horyn has a thought-provoking review of the Met's new exhibition Model As Muse: Embodying Fashion. The show, which opened Monday night with the Costume Institute's behemoth annual fashion binge known as The Met Ball, explores models' roles in "projecting, and sometimes inspiring, the fashion of their respective eras."

A section of the exhibition. Photography Sara Krulwich/NYT

While the premise of the exhibition is valid and even overdue, and I look forward to checking it out for myself, from the outset it was clear that even the slightest missteps in curation could collapse the show into extreme vapidity (same goes for this blog, I should add).

Met Ball partygoers

Leave it to Cathy Horyn to smash it apart and pick up the pieces. Her review is full of great one-liners and bits of information, but one of the most interesting points comes toward the end, when she notes that "What goes unaddressed is the change from film to digital photography, and how that affected sittings and the dynamics of the photographer-model relationship."

Jean Shrimpton. Photography Richard Avedon.

I am not one of those people who thinks of the film-to-digital evolution as inherently "bad" or "good" – I think it's just "different" – but Horyn's point is a good one, and previously overlooked as far as I can tell (or at least overshadowed by the more common complaint about digital photography: that you can never believe what you see). With film, it was possible for a shoot consisting of only a photographer, a model, a stylist and an art director to produce iconic results; with digital that is also true, but in my experience, digital shoots for magazines or campaigns often come with large teams of technicians, and there tends to be a lot of stopping and starting and reviewing on-set. The process is different and that has fundamentally changed the interaction between photographer and model. Horyn had the presence of mind during the mayhem of the Met Ball to discuss this with veterans such as Marisa Berenson, Lauren Hutton, Twiggy, and Carmen Dell'Orefice, and you can listen in here.

I don't read much about fashion, or at least not much that is very interesting, but I always learn something new from Cathy Horyn. She's extremely sharp and witty in her own way, and as fashion critic for the Old Gray Lady, she is both in the mix and above it all. Read her review of Model as Muse here.

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Related, from a recent issue of WWWWD, which New York magazine is calling the fashion version of The Onion:

Authoritative Cathy Horyn Blog Impossible To Disagree With, No Matter How Hard You Try

By Ruth-Ann Horsen

Cambridge, MA. — “What Cathy says, goes,” said Job Korby Jr. “We’ve always known this, but only now have we begun to understand it.” Over the next three months, Mr. Korby, 33, a senior research analyst at MIT, will lead a team of 30 graduate students in an effort to investigate the phenomenon called “The Horyn Factor.” Cathy Horyn’s infamous New York Times blog, “On the Runway,” a compulsive read for fashion professionals, is known for its ability to make—or, more often, break—decade-long careers. It is rumored that after a recent post dismissing the entire premise of Ralph Lauren as “outdated and out of touch,” a single tear struggled down one of the designer’s cheeks. Research, however, has been slow. “Control groups that haven’t read the blog seem to adopt Cathy’s opinion as soon as a laptop is introduced within a 500-yard radius. We’re finding it difficult to even engage researchers in scientific debate, so absolute is the power of our subject matter, that is, her blog.”

Read WWWWD's May 5th Met Ball Special here.

Running, Jumping, Standing Still

Martin Munkacsi Peignoir in a light breeze, 1936

One of several shows opening January 16th at the International Center of Photography draws from a newly discovered cache of Hungarian photographer Martin Munkacsi's negatives. There was another exhibition of his work at ICP a few years ago and it was truly stunning. Munkacsi (my Hungarian friend tells me it's pronounced kind of like "Moon-Kashi") was one of the most famous photographers in the world in his day, influencing greats such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Richard Avedon with his unique take on photo-journalism – and, later, on fashion photography through his work with Carmel Snow at Harper's Bazaar.

Left, Martin Munkacsi, 1933 / Right, Richard Avedon, 1969

Here are some of my favorite Munkacsi images:

Martin Munkacsi, Berlin vs. Budapest, ca. 1928

Martin Munkacsi, Greta Garbo on vacation, ca. 1932

Martin Munkacsi, Lucile Brokaw on the Long Island Beach, 1933

Munkacsi's Lost Archive runs January 16–May 3 at ICP. If you can't make it or want more images/info, Steidl released a great book on Munkacsi's life and work in 2006:


All images © Joan Munkacsi