As well as his fashion photography, he was well known for his black-and-white portraiture.
Richard served as a staff photographer for Harper’s Bazaar for 20 years, from 1945 to 1965. Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, he created elegant black-and-white photographs showcasing the latest fashions in real-life settings such as Paris’s cafes, cabarets, and streetcars. Within a year, Avedon was hired as a staff photographer for the magazine.
Beginning of Photography CareerĪvedon attended the New School for Social Research in New York to study photography under Alexey Brodovitch, the acclaimed art director of Harper’s Bazaar. His insistence on models conveying emotion and movement was a welcome departure from the norm of relatively motionless fashion photography. He then moved on to fashion, shooting for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. Starting out as a photographer for the US Merchant Marines during World War II, he took ID portraits of sailors. Who was Richard Avedon?Īvedon was born on May 15, 1923, in New York City and was best known for his work in the fashion world and minimalist portraits. This aspect of his photography also inspired me and forms the basis for my own personal projects, such as the UK visual artist portraits that I’m currently working on.
These images were taken purely for pleasure and not as a commercial project. He consistently took pictures of his family, and whilst traveling. Photography was very much a part of his personal life too. The structure of his working life was a huge inspiration for my own photography career and I attempt to follow his blueprint in my own work. It always impressed me how he managed to combine his own artistic personal projects with editorial, magazine, and commercial work. His work was an incredible commentary and document of the time. In his lifetime, he produced an impressive quantity of high-quality work, photographing a very wide range of interesting people including celebrities, politicians, artists, poets, and writers. One project of his called ‘In the American West’ (1985) had a lasting impression on me, in that every portrait in the project was a powerful image taken of a visually interesting character.Īvedon was an extremely hardworking, prolific photographer. He was both a fashion and portrait photographer and pioneered his own signature style of black-and-white portrait photography. When I first started my photography degree in 1996 and began to research well-known portrait photographers, I was struck by the strength of Richard Avedon’s powerful imagery, and in particular, his black and white portraits.
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