Question about Avedon's Portrait work

[Robert Skeoch]

Just looking for some basic photo information about Avedon's in the west portrait work. It seems like outdoor light in the shade with a no-seam background but does any one know the tech info. What lenes he liked, or film choices. Thanks.
-rob

[Carl Weese]

The seamless was usually hung on the side of a big RV that he used to travel for the project. Camera was an 8x10 Deardorff, and I think I read that the lens was a 360mm Symmar. Film was Tri-X. The RV was parked in the correct orientation to create the open shade lighting for each set. Avedon worked standing right next to the lens while an assistant changed film holders at the back of the camera.---Carl

[Ellis Vener]

Most of it is as you have surmised: indirect daylight wit ha white seamless paper background. A very few were shot using electronic flash Eveerythign was shot on 8x10. He used an 8 x 10" Deardorff and most likely a lens in the 12 -14' range (300-360mm). Maybe a Commercial Ektar? I'm pretty sure the film was Tri-X (but remember Tri-X now is not the same as Tri-X then.)

The prints were definitely worked on quite critically in the darkroom when they were enlarged -lots of very precise burning and dodging and maybe some bleaching and toning afterwards. Supposedly to get an absolutely flat white background i nthe print, the negatives were those areas were masked off using either ruby "lith" material or red lipstick applied directly to the negative (no I'm not making that up). He also tended to shoot a lot of film per subject to get just the right combination of gesture and expression that he was looking for.

And that latter detail is really where the power of his portraits come from , not the technical how to details. He knew or at least had a sense of what he was looking for.

[Ellis Vener]

Avedon worked standing right next to the lens while an assistant changed film holders at the back of the camera.---Carl Weese

An another cocked the shutter and took meter readings. Other assistants would go out into crowds and look for people he might like to photograph.

I've always wonder what happened to the photographs of the people who didn't make it into the finished project.

[tim atherton]

http://www.photoeye.com/templates/mShowDetailsbycat.cfm?Catalog=UT115

click on the book tease for starters

then you can find a cheaper copy in stock somehwere at ABE

and also


http://www.photoeye.com/templates/mShowDetailsbycat.cfm?Catalog=ZB176 (http://www.photoeye.com/templates/mShowDetailsbycat.cfm?Catalog=ZB176)

[domenico Foschi]

Michael, i don't understand why you think is disrespectful.
Avedon being a professional, i am sure paid his subjects, he also provided some of them with prints.
His models i am sure signed release forms, and moreover as he stated more times, portraits of his models were never about them as much as himself.
What really revived interst in me about his work recently , was reading that he was an admirer of the austrian painter Egon Shiele, my personal favourite.
And looking at many of his compositions, i can see the influence Shiele had on him ( you owe it to yourself to see this artist's work if you never have ).
I think he used for his American west a 360 Symmar-s, and he wanted a flat light because as he stated < he didn't want to add any "artificial mood " by creating shadows.

[Armin Seeholzer]

And there is a picture wich shows himself at the side of a Sinar P 8x10 on a cable release!
So I'm a bit in doubt thad he used a Deardorff!
Just my 2 cents!

[Jim Ewins]

If one reads Laura Wilson's book, "Avedon at Work", answers to many of the above quiries are found. Looking at his work methods; placing his subjects in front of a white background and the poses, indicate to me that he had no more respect for his subjects than Weston had for his nudes. I like his rich blacks and sometimes good gradations but looking at his work is not my idea of pleasure.

[Bill_1856]

That is a completely unfounded statement about Weston. If you've read the daybooks, you must know that Weston had great and professional respect for his nude models. The hanky-panky, when it came, came afterwards.

[Gary J. McCutcheon]

Avedon used many cameras. The Deardorff 8x10 was used on this project which was shot on location. The Sinar P was used mostly in the studio.

[Ellis Vener]

Avedon had a long and apparently well founded reputation (from the people he photographed and also people who worked with and for him) for treating the the people he photographed with a great deal of respect. People who worked for him? That is a different matter but he also was known for driving himself very hard. My favorite Avedon quote is from the Diane Arbus biography. Diane and Alan Arbus were fashion photographers in the 1950s (Diane did the styling, Alan did the snapping) . one day Avedon dropped by their studio and the Arbuses complained about how hard fashion work was. According to Alan, Avedon replied in surprise "It is?" later he was one of Diane's close circle of friends and chief encouragers after she started doing the work she became famous for.

I have no knowledge of what Avedon did with the negatives that didn't make it into the book and exhibition. I do remember reading a couple of years ago that for a retrospective he had his assistants go back through all of the negatives in his archive (stretching back to the 1940s) and made fresh contact sheets of every single one and I do remember seeing some work from the "In the American West" project that I hadn't seen before. So maybe this is myth? I guess I'll need to find the Laura Wilson book now.

Since writing that last sentence I found this link that might be interesting: http://www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0406/av_intro.html (http://www.digitaljournalist.org/issue0406/av_intro.html)

[Ellis Vener]

I decided to go right to the source and it turns out I was wrong about the all of the negatives from the "In the American West" project being archived. According to Norma Stevens at Richard Avedon's studio:

...negatives of rejects all destroyed. Negatives of choices, kept at the Amon Carter (the museum in Ft. Worth that commisioned the project) but cancelled so no further prints can ever be made.

In the http://www.digitaljournalist.org (http://www.digitaljournalist.org) URL I linked to above I found the following:

The challenge for Avedon was to find a connection to people with whom he was unfamiliar, people who mined coal, worked in slaughter houses, or waitressed at roadside cafes. "In the West," Avedon said, "I worked with very, very strong feelings. I photographed what I feared: aging, death, and the despair of living," On the road, Dick often had severe headaches. He would go back to the motel, pull the shades down, take some medicine, and wait until the headaches went away. In retrospect he said, "Those were important headaches. The work was not thought out. I was expressing my feelings in the only way I could, by taking pictures. It came from within, from a desire to make the portraits crucial. When I try to put it into words, it's less than the pictures will ever be."



In Butte, Montana, Dick photographed an unemployed copper miner, Roy Gustavson and his wife Judy. I remember he looked in wonder at them. It was 1983, and eighteen hundred miners had just been laid off. Seven hundred houses were up for sale. The huge Berkley open-pit mine shut down. The value of copper had dropped. The selling price of 75 cents per pound didn't cover the cost - a dollar a pound - to get the ore out of the ground. "Butte couldn't be worse if a cyclone hit it," one miner told us. What happens to people when they lose their work? Where do they go when there's nowhere to turn? These were the questions the men and women in the portraits faced. Luck running out formed the narrative behind many of the photographs.



Avedon chose certain people because they seemed to be asking, on a deep level, some of the questions he was asking. He saw in them an expression of what he himself felt. I'm sure a great many people he photographed had their own expectations for the photographs and had no idea what he was doing or why he chose them. They could not anticipate what his pictures of them would look like. By conventional terms, many of the portraits were unflattering. Critics attacked him for exploiting people who were unaware of his intentions. In his forward to In the American West, he said, "A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone willing to become implicated in a fiction he cannot possibly know about. My concerns are not his. We have separate ambitions for the image. His need to plead his case probably goes as deep as my need to plead mine, but the control is with me."



I assisted Richard Avedon for six years and watched a man who had spent almost forty years looking and judging, selecting and inventing, transforming his subjects into metaphors of his own meaning. He looked for inspiration everywhere. Work had become the source of his energy and he worked constantly often to exhaustion. Everything else in his life was secondary. I saw what was given up, what was gained and I learned just how imaginative, unrelenting and brave an artist must be.



In the end Richard Avedon photographed 752 people, using 17,000 sheets of film. We worked in 17 states and 189 towns. From this collection he chose 123 photographs for the exhibition at the Amon Carter Museum. Mitch Wilder died on April 1, 1979 of leukemia after having been diagnosed only six weeks earlier. He never saw a photograph from the western project. The museum went forward with the project. In the end, the portraits were printed life-size and slightly larger to provoke a confrontation between the viewer and the subject. In life, you often can't really look at someone the way you would like to, you can't stare. It would be embarrassing. In movies and on television people move, but with these large portraits, you could stand in front of them and look for as long as you wanted. And the people looked back. There was an exchange. In that scale the photographs took on a life of their own. Dick said, "I know that sounds like fake modesty, or some Zen thing, but really I feel that these people are so powerful. When you look, really look, they say such varied things with their faces and their bodies. It's almost as if there was no photographer. I'm out of it. I feel the work now belongs to the people themselves. It's between them and you."--Laura Wilson