Page 35 - Studio International - September 1974

DORE ASHTON

Stravinsky — composer 2 November 1969
THE MATURE PORTRAITIST..

RICHARD AVEDON

When Richard Avedon was 19 he joined the struggled with them and emerged using the During the past few years, however, Avedon
Merchant Marine where he was assigned to same means as his painterly predecessors : has achieved an intensity in his portraiture that
make identity photographs, or 'mug shots'. He increasing concentration, concision, daring and subsumes both modes. He has worked usually
often refers to the experience: 'I must have taken abstraction. with what he once called 'earthly saints', or
pictures of maybe one hundred thousand baffled It doesn't require much specialized knowledge people who were obsessed with work of one sort
faces before it ever occurred to me I was of the history of photography to recognize that or another. The quality of obsession is his
becoming a photographer.' Some thirty years banalities flood the field. Much photography — as theme. He scans for the marks of obsession, and
later, Avedon is still contending with the was frankly admitted in the nineteenth century in compiling them, is himself obsessed. Most of
bafflement, coquetry and resistance of faces, but when such books as Francis Frith's 'The us recall a face in terms of an expression or
the situation has changed. The 'mug shot' has Gossiping Photographer at Hastings' appeared — characteristic we can name. Think of Auden's
been transformed into a powerful and highly is just that: gossip. It is commonplace small face, or Pound's. We have to 'think' it, make the
abstract conception of portraiture. talk translated into images. But a few artists have ensemble in our minds, compose it into its
Avedon makes a sharp distinction between always known that the camera can be as incisive characteristic expression which can be named.
commissioned photographs — elegant and a tool as a burin. Avedon, even in his earliest The artistic portraitist goes through the same
memorable shots of celebrities in Vogue and photographs of Italy just after the war (possibly process, but, obsessed as he is with precision,
-other slick magazines — and works he inspired by Cartier-Bresson) knew how to expends such concentration that the face is
commissions of himself. Parallel to his accent and compose; how to take the cliché out drawn mysteriously into a moment of highest
professional life as photographer there has been of the cliché. At the outset of his career as a revelation. It becomes, as Avedon says, a symbol
his inner life as artist that sporadically assumes professional, he had already specialized in the of itself. `If I could work with my eyes only!'
full possession. This artist is consumed with the two modes that have persisted in his work ever Avedon exclaims. The camera, the tool,
furore to know the human condition through since: the one veering toward expressionism, impedes. Symbolization is a split-second
visible traces on the human countenance. The with its distortions and caricatural propensities, conjunction of myriad problems, and above all,
elusive problems that have preoccupied epitomized by such studies as that of Oscar moral problems.
portraitists throughout history have converged Levant; the other meditative and formal, as in In a way, Avedon sets his problem morally
in Avedon's mature life as artist. He has the numerous portrait studies of writers. first. He is a studio photographer. He works as
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