More on Richard Avedon from Laura Wilson:

[Ellis Vener]

This was in the Sunday Times of London and was forwarded to me by Bill Mitchell:


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2099-1411591,00.html

It is an account of working with him during his last weeks while he was photographing for the "Democracy 2004" project, including his last sessions with US military veterans of the Iraq war.

[Ellis Vener]

Just found this link as well from a couple of months earlier in the same newspaper:


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2099-1196189,00.html

[Frank Petronio]

Thanks Ellis - worth reading, good stuff.

Are these latest photos online anywhere, and/or which issue of the New Yorker did they run in?

[Ellis Vener]

Go to : http://newyorker.com/online/covers/?041108onco_covers_gallery1

and then click on the "related links" button.

[tim atherton]

Issue of 2004-11-01


http://newyorker.com/online/covers/?041108onco_covers_gallery1

I think the slideshow (top right) has all the photos from the portfolio - have to check my pile of New Yorkers in the bathroom...

the web view is already a step down from the magazine reproduction

[Jim Rice]

I caught Avedon's New Yorker piece at the doctor's office. Some of my favorites of his work and nicely reproduced, too.

[Ellis Vener]

Actually it is a couple of steps below the magazine reproduction.

For starters, the images in the slide show are only about 500 pixels wide --which hardly does justice to the subtlety of the individual images that were printed at or close to their full 8"x10" size in the magazine (not all were). Just as important, in the slide show you only see the images one at a time and you miss the context of how the images relate to one another by layout --place on the page or in a two page spread, their relation to each other, and how the juxtaposition of a specific portrait across the gutter from (an)other specific portrait(s), and how one size print against other size prints works; and how he made color and black & white images share the same visual space with out one dominating the other , or how one large print one or to a group of with one another. Layout & design were very important issues that Avedon understood more fully and deeply than most photographers do -- the way that not only words and pictures come together to tell a story, but additionally pictures and pictures come together with words.

When laying out images if you reproduce all of your photos at the same size in a visual space (in the case of a magazine that space is a two page (or more) spread; in a gallery setting you are basically dealing with the 3D nature of the room and then as a subset of that a single wall) you are saying they of the images deserve an equal command of your attention, an equality that is not necessarily really there or necessarily intended. In this slide show those carefully built relationships found in the original form of the magazine are further negated by the images being flipped up one card at a time like playing cards - only one card is visible at a time and the card you just looked at is shuffled back to the bottom of the deck: out of sight = out of mind.

One thing I have not seen commented on by anyone else is the curiousity that Avedon literally began and ended his career as a photographer by photographing the same subject: the more or less anonymous-to-the-rest-of-us members of the military, the grunts. I nthe Coast Guard during WWIi he did I.D shots of Navy personel passing through the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The very last photos he made were of soldiers who had been in Iraq.

[lee\c]

I got to see and hear Laura Wilson speak at the Amon Carter Museum when her book about Avedon came out. She talked for a little while and showed some slides and answered a few questions. Then she interduced Richard hisownself Avedon. He got up and talked a bit and answered a lot of questions. He was 80 years old at the time. He had a phenominal amount of energy and he was very gracious to all that asked questions. It was a highlight night for me.

He will be missed in the photographic community.

leec