Richard Avedon didn’t do subtle. Six years after Robert Frank had published his widely celebrated The Americans, Avedon produced his own take on the United States, Nothing Personal. Where Frank asked his viewers to look for traces of his discontent that would reflect on the country as a whole, Avedon shoved his into their faces: there are photographs of Nazis giving the Hitler salute, an old, weary former president, a Black fist covering a whole page of the oversized coffee-table book… And there was an essay by James Baldwin, an old high-school friend.
This was as uncouth a publication as you could produce if you wanted to enter the world of art. Consequently, the work was widely dismissed for all the reasons that were to be expected, the most important one of course left unspoken: how dare a commercially successful photographer pretend to be an artist?
You might wonder… If the country is brash and not subtle, then why should criticism and love be conveyed in a subtle and not a brash fashion? And why couldn’t a commercial photographer do it?
Maybe it was the fact that everything Avedon did in his work was done for effect that had his critics on edge. How could he have not done it otherwise, though, given that he had emerged from the world of fashion where there is no real substance — only effect?
Weren’t the critics who had their problems with the production of Nothing Personal complaining about the fact that Avedon had given them what they had wanted? It’s just that they didn’t want it this way: they didn’t want to be reminded that art had become a part of the world of luxury. And they didn’t want to acknowledge that criticism (and love) can also come from those from whom you’d least expect it.
It is when Richard Avedon turned his tricks towards those whose pomposity would deflate once it was on display in the gigantic prints he loved hanging on the walls of galleries that he succeeded as the artist that he so desperately wanted to be. Of course, this approach could go horribly wrong, such as when he traversed the American West to photograph an assortment of underprivileged people. But it brilliantly succeeded when, for example, the Chicago Seven were shown right next to the country’s military leaders.
In photography, the surface is all you get. Artists have long tried to dig deeper and to convince their viewers that, you see, there is so much more if you just look carefully enough. Whether he was aware of this or not, Avedon response was: no, there isn’t. The surface is all you got. And I’m going to show it to you in such a fashion that you feel that you can crawl into the pores of the people in my pictures.
In some ways, all of the above makes Avedon a more interesting artist than Robert Frank. It’s just very hard to realize this, given that the bad work (however you might personally define it) is, well, so bad.
But the good work is really good, good in ways that often runs counter many people’s refined, or rather too refined, instincts. It’s blunt, no doubt. But now that we live in a world where the most unrefined and blunt people possess all of the political power, more and more people appear to be realizing that it’s fine, yet pointless, to aim high when others go low.
We could forever argue over whether or not some of Avedon’s work was cruel, in particular the portraits of his aging, ailing father. But it might be time to accept that the best photographs are those that force a viewer to acknowledge the presence of two or more conflicting emotions.
Photographs often will either do this, or they won’t, and they might do it in a fashion that depends solely on the individual looking at them (hence Roland Barthes’ punctum). And yet, many photographs evoke the same boiling emotions in people. Photographs might be described as arresting (or any variant thereof) or exploitative (ditto) — as if both could not in fact be the case at the same time. The latter aspect, exploitation, will typically infuriate people and harden the front line.
This is not to excuse exploitation per se. It’s just that photography itself lives from it, given that the person making the decision which photograph(s) will be seen inevitably is the one who possesses a vastly larger understanding of why that is the case than whoever finds themselves in the frame(s). Try as you might to describe why a meal tastes good, the professional chef who made it has an entirely different vocabulary and background knowledge to produce such an explanation.
Given that photography is at least in theory much more democratic than cooking, this makes photography unfair. Even as inadvertently you might be able to take a great picture, it will be little more than a fluke, while a professional will know how to get their fluke again and again.
Richard Avedon was a true confidence man if there ever was one in photography. Finding his footing in the world of fashion, which does not accept anything other than the kind of confidence that in ordinary life is mostly described by the term bullshit, Avedon quickly became the most sought after, the most successful commercial US photographer in the latter half of the 20th Century.
Confidence and ambition are not entirely separate: if anything, Avedon possessed an overabundance of ambition, which, of course, was and is mistaken for confidence by those not burdened with a family background where recognition is desperately sought after and rarely, if ever, achieved.
Richard Avedon’s narcissism — it’s impossible to look at his self portraits without coming away with a very strong sense of it — was grounded in this elemental weakness: here was a man who desperately wanted to be acknowledged by the people who mattered most to him: his mother, his father, his sister.
Alas, the parents performed an unhappy marriage that ended in divorce, the father was an immigrant child who suffered through more than one severe hardship while trying to build a successful life in the country he had been transplanted into as a young child, and the sister was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
If as a viewer you didn’t know anything about the relationship between the photographer and the old man that was his father, increasingly looking frail and unwell, I think you might still infer that they were not merely two strangers who had met to engage in a game of photography. The tenacity with which these photographs were taken hints at something deeper, at a hurt experienced by the person behind the camera.
Strangers will do all kinds of cruel things to one another. But strangers will not simultaneously struggle with the source of their own cruelty in such an obvious fashion. Yes, the photographs are cruel in some fashion. Typically, in the Western tradition the approaching presence of death, something we must all face eventually, will have photographers step back from depicting the ravages of time and illness that become etched into a dying person’s face.
But death is an inevitability, and there is little, if anything, to be gained from denying it or from softening language so that someone has not died but passed on. Depending on one’s belief systems, the dead might have indeed passed on to another world. And yet, they are also dead at the same time. To use “pass on” implies a continuum of experience that in actuality does not exist: the moment someone has died, all that has been left unsaid will forever be unsaid.
Maybe that’s the cruelty that some critics have detected in Avedon’s photographs of his father and other elderly people: a reminder that once a person has died, there is no more opportunity to say what could, or should, have been said — in effect an admission of their own fallibility as human beings.
Who knows?
The full set of Richard Avedon’s portraits of his father with a long text about the family and the final years of the old man’s life, alongside a collection of other photographs of old people — that’s Immortal, a new, essential catalogue. I suspect that most people will be drawn to the many portraits of the other old people, many of them very well known (at least in their time).
But it’s the set of photographs portraying Jacob Israel Avedon that forms the core of the book and that deserves to be seen and felt widely. We have no way of knowing what was omitted from the text that outlines the final years of the father-son relationship. Whatever it might have been, I’m not sure it would have added much of value. There already is plenty to chew on.
We get to see two men trying to come to terms with their flawed relationship, and their hurt. One of them is handling the camera, the other one has given him permission to do so. It’s impossible to know, but I feel that they both went as far as they were capable of in terms of seeing the other man for who he wanted to be, regardless of however much they agreed with that other man’s choices.
We avert our eyes from the ravages of age and, instead, celebrate youth as if it had anything other to offer than smooth skin and many illusions not yet ground away by life. This is unfair to all those involved. It’s unfair to the young who have no other path in front of them than to gradually lose their seemingly biggest advantage; and it’s unfair to the old who have gone through life, only to now being set aside as, well, undesirable.
It needn’t be this way. If there is one thing that is equally guaranteed to all of us it’s that we age, and then we die. But happiness is entirely divorced from all of that. For example, late in life Jacob Israel Avedon re-married and, by all accounts, enjoyed his life.
There even is a photograph in the book that shows him smiling at the camera, while his grandson is standing right next to him, and there is a sliver of Richard Avedon in the frame as well.
I don’t know whether it is really true that at a triumph during the Roman era, whoever was being honoured had someone stand next to or behind him, to whisper into his ear “remember that you are mortal” (“memento mori”). But it’s worthwhile remembering, regardless of whatever life throws at us: we are all going to die. There is no point in making our own or other people’s lives miserable for any reason.
And photography doesn’t really stop time. Sure, in a photograph it does. But time still goes on and on, and at some stage only the pictures are left.
There is a lesson in that, and that is the lesson of Immortal.
Highly recommended.
Immortal: Portraits of Aging, 1951-2004; photographs by Richard Avedon; edited by Paul Roth; texts by Adam Gopnik, Vince Aletti, Gaëlle Morel; 208 pages; Phaidon; 2025