Richard Avedon, 1923 - 2004.

Richard Avedon, whose fashion and portrait photographs helped define America's image of style, beauty and culture for the last half-century, died yesterday in a hospital in San Antonio. He was 81 and lived in Manhattan.

[...]

"I've photographed just about everyone in the world," Mr. Avedon said. "But what I hope to do is photograph people of accomplishment, not celebrity, and help define the difference once again."

Andy Grundberg in the New York Times.

His best-known photographs, from the Parisienne leaping over a puddle in high heels to his dying father's desperate face, all share a belief in the heroism of self-assertion, a belief that every leap is a leap of faith. His definitive portraits of the powerful and the powerless - encompassing, in a manner almost without equal in the history of portraiture, the artistic and political hierarchies of the past half century of American life - were almost Roman in their severe authority.

Adam Gopnik for the New Yorker.

I've worked out of a series of no's. No to exquisite light, no to apparent compositions, no to the seduction of poses or narrative. And all these no's force me to the "yes." I have a white background. I have the person I'm interested in and the thing that happens between us.

Richard Avedon.

Posted by dwhudson at October 2, 2004 3:47 AM