Richard Avedon - Portraits - 1977

HIGHLY IMPRESSIVE BOOK FROM 1976 (!) by fantastic American photographer RICHARD AVEDON (1923-2004),
one of the best portrait and fashion photographers ever.

ONE OF AVEDON'S STRONGEST BOOKS.

EXTRAORDINARY SET OF PORTRAITS of writers, artists and public figures -
each framed in Richard Avedon's characteristic negative borders.

84 fantastic black and white, full page photographs of a large, most illustrious group of celebrities framed by edges of film strips. Includes over fifty portraits of celebrities, writers and artists from the 1950s, 60s and 70s, including Marilyn
Monroe, William F. Buckley, Igor Stravinsky, Marcel Duchamp, Marianne Moore, The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Ezra Pound, the Everly Brothers, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jean Genet, Truman Capote, J. Robert Oppenheimer, President Eisenhower and many more.Four of the photographic takes are fold-outs with Igor Stravinsky, The Chicago Seven, Andy Warhol and Factory Members, and the Mission Council. The final images in the book are moving portraits of his dying father, Jacob Israel Avedon, taken between October 1969 and August 1973.
The power of these images is in the expressiveness of gesture and facial feature Richard Avedon has drawn from his subjects.

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Richard Avedon is one of the most sought-after and most influantial advertising photographers in America from the 1940s to the beginning of the 21st century.
Richard Avedon is creating work that exemplified Madison Avenue at the height of its influence in world culture.
Richard Avedon is famous for landmark photobooks like 'Observations' (1959, cooperation with Truman Capote, Andrew Roth, The Book of 101 Books, page 148/149), like "Nothing Personal' (1964, cooperation with James Baldwin, Martin Parr, Gerry Badger, The Photobook, volume 1, page 252) or like "In the American West" (1985, Martin Parr, The Photobook, vol 2, page 38).

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Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York. 1977. First American edition, second printing.

Paperback. 230 x 305 mm. 141 pages (including 4 fold-out pages). Photos: Richard Avedon. Layout: Elizabeth Paul. Text: Harold Rosenberg (introductory essay: 'A Meditation on Likeness'). Text in English.

Condition:
Book inside and outside clean with no previous owner marks and with no foxing, a bit yellowed, pages smell a bit like smoke, no other remarkable flaws or defects. Overall fine condition.

Great photobook and a must-have title for every ambitious photobook collection and for sure for every fan and admirer of Richard Avedon's work (and there are a lot, with a cause).

This book presents a curated selection of photographs from the extensive career of richard avedon, capturing the essence of his six-decade journey. The collection features striking portraits of notable figures such as Dwight Eisenhower, Truman Capote, Rose Mary Woods, and Andy Warhol, showcasing avedon's talent for revealing the true identity and presence of his subjects without the use of illusionistic effects. As an innovative artist, avedon redefined the concept of portraiture, portraying his subjects against a minimalist white backdrop to eliminate distractions and highlight their unique characteristics. with a keen interest in the personalities he photographed, Richard Avedon's work includes iconic figures as well as ordinary Americans.

"Richard Avedon was born and lived in New York City. His interest in photography began at an early age, and he joined the Young Men’s Hebrew Association (YMHA) camera club when he was twelve years old. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, where he co-edited the school’s literary magazine, The Magpie, with James Baldwin. He was named Poet Laureate of New York City High Schools in 1941.
Avedon joined the armed forces in 1942 during World War II, serving as Photographer’s Mate Second Class in the U.S. Merchant Marine. As he described it, “My job was to do identity photographs. I must have taken pictures of one hundred thousand faces before it occurred to me I was becoming a photographer."
After two years of service, he left the Merchant Marine to work as a professional photographer, initially creating fashion images and studying with art director Alexey Brodovitch at the Design Laboratory of the New School for Social Research.
At the age of twenty-two, Avedon began working as a freelance photographer, primarily for Harper’s Bazaar. Initially denied the use of a studio by the magazine, he photographed models and fashions on the streets, in nightclubs, at the circus, on the beach and at other uncommon locations, employing the endless resourcefulness and inventiveness that became a hallmark of his art. Under Brodovitch’s tutelage, he quickly became the lead photographer for Harper’s Bazaar.
From the beginning of his career, Avedon made formal portraits for publication in Theatre Arts, Life, Look, and Harper’s Bazaar magazines, among many others. He was fascinated by photography’s capacity for suggesting the personality and evoking the life of his subjects. He registered poses, attitudes, hairstyles, clothing and accessories as vital, revelatory elements of an image. He had complete confidence in the two-dimensional nature of photography, the rules of which he bent to his stylistic and narrative purposes. As he wryly said, “My photographs don’t go below the surface. I have great faith in surfaces. A good one is full of clues.”
After guest-editing the April 1965 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, Avedon quit the magazine after facing a storm of criticism over his collaboration with models of color. He joined Vogue, where he worked for more than twenty years. In 1992, Avedon became the first staff photographer at The New Yorker, where his portraiture helped redefine the aesthetic of the magazine. During this period, his fashion photography appeared almost exclusively in the French magazine Égoïste.
Throughout, Avedon ran a successful commercial studio, and is widely credited with erasing the line between “art” and “commercial” photography. His brand-defining work and long associations with Calvin Klein, Revlon, Versace, and dozens of other companies resulted in some of the best-known advertising campaigns in American history. These campaigns gave Avedon the freedom to pursue major projects in which he explored his cultural, political, and personal passions. He is known for his extended portraiture of the American Civil Rights movement, the Vietnam war and a celebrated cycle of photographs of his father, Jacob Israel Avedon. In 1976, for Rolling Stone magazine, he produced “The Family,” a collective portrait of the American power elite at the time of the country’s bicentennial election. From 1979 to 1985, he worked extensively on a commission from the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, ultimately producing the show and book In the American West.
Avedon’s first museum retrospective was held at the Smithsonian Institution in 1962. Many major museum shows followed, including two at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1978 and 2002), the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (1970), the Amon Carter Museum of American Art (1985), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (1994). His first book of photographs, Observations, with an essay by Truman Capote, was published in 1959. He continued to publish books of his works throughout his life, including Nothing Personal in 1964 (with an essay by James Baldwin), Portraits 1947–1977 (1978, with an essay by Harold Rosenberg), An Autobiography (1993), Evidence 1944–1994 (1994, with essays by Jane Livingston and Adam Gopnik), and The Sixties (1999, with interviews by Doon Arbus).
After suffering a cerebral hemorrhage while on assignment for The New Yorker, Richard Avedon died in San Antonio, Texas on October 1, 2004. He established The Richard Avedon Foundation during his lifetime."
(website foundation Richard Avedon)