Author Description

Richard Avedon revolutionized fashion photography in the years after World War II, shaking up the genre's turgid visual formulae. His style was influenced by a variety of experiences and encounters, from his stint as a photographer in the Merchant Marines to his admiration of the great Hungarian-born photographer Martin Munkacsi. By 1950, he was the most controversial and most imitated American editorial photographer, and had anticipated many of the cross-fertilizations that later occurred between high art, commercial art, fashion and pop culture. Fueled by his phenomenal energy and imagination, Avedon overturned social barriers and greatly enlarged our ideas of what fashion means today. He was the first to use a non-Caucasian model, China Machado, in a major fashion magazine, and he actively supported the career of the first African American model in haute couture, Donyale Luna. Avedon successfully merged commercial photography with fine art and photojournalism, and brought popular culture into fashion, anticipating a trend that exploded in the 1990s and continues into the present. This book, which accompanies a landmark exhibition, is the first thorough exploration of his extraordinary ongoing influence and presents new scholarship on the evolution and impact of his work. As a teenager, Richard Avedon took a job in a photo studio, and by 1946 had set up one of his own. He regularly worked for Harper's Bazaar, a relationship that continued until 1965 when he became staff photographer for Vogue, remaining there until 1990. Hired as the New Yorker's first staff photographer in 1992, he was on assignment for the magazine in San Antonio, Texas, in September 2004 when he suffered a brain hemorrhage. Avedon died on October 1, leaving his last project, titled On Democracy (documenting the 2004 U.S. presidential election) unfinished.