Photographer
Richard Avedon stripped the portrait down to a face, a camera, and whatever truth they could locate between them: white backgrounds, direct confrontation, no props, no sets, no narrative scaffolding. He photographed Marilyn Monroe and migrant workers with identical intensity, because to him they were equally worth that attention. That moral equivalence is his most radical act.
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Major Works
In the American West (1985)
Five years. 17,000 miles. Working-class Americans photographed with the rigor usually reserved for presidents.
Marilyn Monroe, 1957
The definitive portrait of American celebrity, gorgeous, exhausted, unknowable.
The Family (1976)
Rolling Stone. The American power structure laid out in a single issue. Defining photojournalism.
In the American West, 40th Anniversary Edition (Monograph)
The book that contains his most radical and humane work. Five years, seventeen thousand miles, and a democratic conviction that every face deserves this much attention.
