Page 36 - Studio International - September 1974

Jacob Israel Avedon - businessman 25 August 1973
the old masters did in formalized sittings. There sitter, to suspend him in the artifice of evened out. The three photographs are at once
is a whole ritual of careful arrangement and long timelessness and spacelessness - an artifice that a study in values and composition, and a
static moments while the two personalities ease we recognize instantly and unconsciously take spiritual narrative. Avedon, with a minimum of
cautiously into the special relationship of artist into account. (The very faces, worked by time, compositional means, has produced an
and model. He feels, and quite correctly, that belie the fiction, yet it is a fiction that we abstraction equal to a poetic portrait by Yeats
sitters come to him as they would to a doctor or acknowledge). The artifice is emphasized by or Eliot.
a fortune teller - to find out how they really are. Avedon's insistence that the black borders The plastic means are important: First, the
`So they're dependent on me. I have to engage denoting the frame on the roll of film, remain. horizontal white mass of shoulders running
them. Otherwise there's nothing to photograph. He leaves the black borders as the painter leaves through the three frames to play against the very
The concentration has to come from me and bare canvas at the edge : to reinforce the paradox slightly oblique line of eyes and brows. These
involve them. Sometimes the force of it grows so of imagery on the two dimensional plane. Like lines are the unifying agents; they remain stable
strong that sounds in the studio go unheard. the painter, also, Avedon reduces his means to throughout the composition while movement is
Time stops. We share a brief intense intimacy. heighten his artistry. In these late portraits, he initiated in light values alone. The stability of
But it's unearned. It has no past . . . no future.' arranges the tonal gradations with infinite the main compositional lines is essential to the
The moral commitment, then, is to art, to the subtlety, and plays them against the few vision of the artist, for here, more than in any
fiction that a photograph of quality always is. compositional elements he allows himself. previous works, Avedon is posing the eternal
Among his highest fictions, and most moving, Stravinsky: a wily old comedian, aware, question of the portraitist: who, exactly, is the
are portraits in which the interrogation of the imperious, ready to impose the pose. In 1958, sitter and if we don't know Stravinsky's face,
signs of the face is made in a few tense, highly Avedon photographed Stravinsky in three- what can the artist leave for us that remains
selective moments. I'm thinking above all of his _ quarter pose and Stravinsky won the agon. He significant?It is a question that veteran
trip tych of Stravinsky portraits, made in stepped forward, grand impresario, lifting his portraitists, such as Frans Hals, must have
November 1969, and the series of portraits of dark glasses and commanding the photographer asked themselves at the end of their lives. When
his father made over a period of six years, to see him as he, for the moment, saw himself. Hals did his group portrait of the corporation
recently exhibited at the Museum of Modern But in 1969, Stravinsky met his match. The running the old people's home, he obviously
Art. In both cases, Avedon strives to isolate the photographer became artist and the contest was regarded each aged face as both a particular

90