Jacob Israel Avedon, Sarasota, Florida, May 15, 1971

Afterimage, Sept-Oct, 1995 by Vince Leo

Of all Avedon's recent testimonials, none is more concise or revealing as a short cassette tape audio tour of his 1994-95 retrospective "Evidence" made for the show's last tour stop, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA). Culled from interviews with radio journalist and independent producer Connie Goldman conducted over a 25-year period beginning in 1970, the audio tour of "Evidence" gets down to business early. After spending a few minutes discussing his early stab at reportage, Avedon tackles what he has called his "serious work," the portraits. For the rest of the tape, from his Vogue portrait work through the fieldsets from In the American West (1985) and the photographs of his dying father, he boils the issues of photography down to issues of portraiture in which the politics of the image are writ into the direct experience of one-on-one relationships.

Avedon discusses photographic truth, authorship and meaning not so much as parts of a theoretical discussion but as parts of himself discovered through the process of photographing others. That's why for Avedon resolving these issues means more than winning a debate; resolution provides him a measure of individuality and the wholeness of an artistic identity. What the MIA tape makes clear is how complex and confusing individuality and identity can be for someone who tries to find them from behind a camera.

Charlene van Tighem, Physical Therapist, 1985

One of the earliest quotes on the audio tour maps out the difficulties Avedon will struggle with for the entire tape. After revealing that "I still use the first camera I ever had, a Rolliflex," Avedon goes on to say that new technology doesn't interest him: what does is "the person in front of me and the moment we share." Although he has since used other cameras (notably an 8x10 view camera), going on record for using the same camera he started with is code for "I'm still the same Avedon, I've never changed. I have integrity as a person and a photographer." On the other hand, describing the photographic act as a moment shared with another person adds a constantly changing cast of creative partners who bring their own individuality to the built-in integrity of Avedon's single-camera identity. The result is his challenging of the fine line between creative integrity and social interaction by insisting on having it both ways. He sees no contradiction in claiming his artistic integrity while admitting that everything he has accomplished as a creative artist depends on the participation of others.

Demanding that he be seen as an artist is nothing new for Avedon; he has spent decades fighting the label "fashion photographer." This is partly because it is important for him to claim his own identity as a photographic artist as opposed to a constantly compromised and therefore non-existent individual associated with "commercial work." In the MIA tape, Avedon bases his claim to being an artist on his "subjectivity," the notion that when we look at an Avedon photograph, whether of Dovima or Marian Anderson, we are also looking at the photographer. "I don't think that I've captured the essence of anyone that I've photographed," Avedon says. "I think I've photographed what I'm feeling myself and recognize in someone else." Like many photographers of his generation (Minor White and Robert Frank come to mind), he believes that describing one's own feelings is the goal of every serious photographer. Finding such feelings is less about self examination than about discovering them through a photographic interaction with the world and its subjects. "A portrait photographer," Avedon says, "depends on another person to complete his picture - the subject imagined - which in a sense is me." Based on the unpredictable complexity of photographic interaction, his idea of subjectivity is a complex social metaphor in which his self is inextricably intertwined with the self of his subjects and theirs with him. His 1993 publication, Autobiography, illustrates the situation perfectly: although the title suggests the story of his life, the book is filled with pictures of other people, as if he can only describe himself through his descriptions of other people.

Billy Mudd, Trucker, 1985

If that sounds very close to a structuralist theory of identity it probably is; the difference being that Avedon's understanding of the self is based less on abstraction than on palpable photographic events. For him the shared moment, the moment of exposure is all there is - the decisive moment as defining moment. He explores it over and over again in his audio tour, each time extending his understanding of what happens in that unpredictable split second. The one point that never changes for Avedon is that the moment of exposure is a social moment. It's "not a picnic or a wedding" but an intense "unearned intimacy" in which the individuality of both photographer and sitter are engulfed in a visceral, "almost erotic" communion. The truth of these interactions isn't the truth of the sitter but the "truth of the moment" as fleeting and unpredictable as the expressions on his sitters' faces. If we take him at his word, his portraits describe neither Avedon nor his subjects, but their interactions, the way the desires, expectations and experiences of both photographer and sitter negotiate themselves during the split second of exposure, each enacting their understanding of the world through the opportunities of the moment.

Avedon is very specific about what he brings to that moment - a desire for control. In Avedon's view, "[The sitter's] need to plead his case is probably as deep as my need to plead mine. But the control is with me." Control is the cornerstone of Avedon's understanding of the photographic self and subjectivity, the key to making his presence known in a photograph. Control means everything from final picture selection to what he admits as his "enormously manipulative" approach during portrait sessions. Everything in his style, from lighting to white backdrop, serves to limit the variables of the portraits, making control that much easier. No matter how simple it looks, the apparatus of control - the editors. the retouchers, the assistants, the lights, the backdrop, the studio. the shutter release in his hand - is always there with him, the photographic equivalent of a power structure. When he insists on control, he is enacting the power of the media system he represents, concentrating all of its control in his photographic person, a gut-level photographic reaction to the lines of force governing not only his own life but a large part of American social relations. When he insists on finding himself in his sitters, he is looking for his own individuality within this system.



This state of affairs wasn't lost on his sitters. As in any portrait, not only what the sitters look like but what they are looking at is important: in Avedon's case, it is his tremendous determination to control the outcome of the social interaction at the heart of the photograph. His sitters don't cede this power to him as much as they respond to it each in his or her own way. From Dwight D. Eisenhower's sad, horrified recognition, to Coco Chanel's spirited withdrawal, to Charlie Chaplin's derisive pan's horns, to Marilyn Monroe's exhausted attempt at seduction, to June Leaf's defensive self-embrace, what we see in Avedon's sitters is the myriad ways individuals respond to power, especially the power of the media. Avedon's portraits aren't soothing - wrestling with power never is - but in the end they act as proof that power is fluid, contested, vulnerable to the vagaries of the moment and the unpredictable nature of human interaction. Avedon doesn't photograph his subjects' submission to his formidable power structure: he captures the ways in which their individualities survive in the face of insurmountable odds. Their survival is his artistic redemption, the very proof he needs of his survival as an artist against the same odds, against the same crushing demands of commerce. Avedon enacts the system he must struggle against; his sitters enact the struggle and the price it exacts. It's not always a pretty picture, but it's the one they create together, the true subject being neither the photographer nor his sitters but the dynamic of their social interaction.

Nowhere is the relationship between Avedon and his subjects more important or misunderstood than in the series of photographs from "In the American West". Criticized for their voyeuristic rendering of Westerners and the fact that the photographer, an Easterner, has attempted to describe a West he has little knowledge of, Avedon responds by calling the Western portraits "a fiction, no more like the true American West than a John Houston movie." Actually, these pictures are documents neither of the photographer nor of Westerners but of the drama they play out and seal at the moment of exposure. Within this photographic theater, Avedon plays the quintessential Easterner, a member of the media elite, an insider, self assured, in control. The Westerners seem to respond as characters who revel in the combination of distrust, boredom, exaggerated freakishness and outright anger they hold for the media elite the photographer enacts, a culture they feel has mostly ignored or misrepresented them. Whether Avedon likes it or not, his determination to see himself in his pictures comes true; the hook is that he see himself through someone else's eyes and sometimes they don't like what they see.

In the end, listening to Avedon negotiate the maze of photographic subjectivity is like listening to a parable of what we'd most like to believe about ourselves: that there is some way we can control the forces that shape our lives and that some sort of true self is possible even in the most intense of media environments. Complicated as it is, his notion of individual identity depends on an interaction in which the subject and the photographer establish some degree of integrity through each other, a point of view rapidly vanishing under the complete disappearance of subject integrity (and sometimes the photographer's) under the technological onslaught of digital reworking. If he sounds most hopeful when he imagines how much our selves, photographic or otherwise, depend on working with others, he rings most true when he says that real interaction feels like standing "naked with one another, raw, trying for something." Listening to Avedon reminds us that engaging the world in its own photographic description remains one of the most vital and complex of efforts - as easy as pushing a button and as difficult as recognizing the individual within the temporal slipstream of an open shutter.

Vince Leo is a photographer and writer living in Minneapolis.




BOOKS: Richard Avedon

* In The American West (2005)
* Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946-2004 (2007)
* Richard Avedon: Portraits of Power (2008)
* Richard Avedon: Made in France (2002)
* Avedon Fashion 1944-2000 (2009)


ASX CHANNEL: Richard Avedon

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