Avedon reinvents fashion photography

At the Design Laboratory Avedon had as an instructor Alexey Brodovitch, who was also the art director of Harper’s Bazaar. 

Brodovitch saw how talented Avedon was and offered him a job in Harper’s Bazaar as a staff photographer.

It is at Harper’s Bazaar that Avedon seriously started his career and that fashion was to start changing. 

Models were usually photographed still, posing, in a studio, or a very simple background. 

Conde Nast Archive 1931
Lee Miller wearing Mirande suit

The models were there to sell what they were wearing; it wasn’t about them, as a person, but more as an object, a hanger if I may say.

Avedon had a very different approach to photographing models. 

Avedon (in Chin’s 1994 article) stated that he loved joyful and imaginative girls and that it was photographing and seeing them move and be themselves that he enjoyed, more than fashion. 

He considered the models in a very different way than the fashion world had because he saw them as women, fun and beautiful.

The first years of the Master

Richard Avedon was born in 1923 in New York City. 

His parents emigrated from Russia to the United States and owned a clothes store for women, where Richard worked while growing up. Val (2004) points out that because of that ‘The world of women, their habits, preoccupations, gestures and desires was familiar to him from an early age’.

He attended De Witt High school from 1929 to 1941.

He got interested in photography from an early age, as he joined the YMHA’s camera club when he was twelve years old. 

He was also interested in literature and was co-editor of the school literary magazine, The Magpie, becoming friends with editor James Baldwin.

In 1941 he becomes poet laureate of the New York City High schools.

He studied for a little while philosophy at Columbia University and then joined the U.S. merchant marine. He was employed to take the soldiers’ ID pictures and that was his first job as a photographer.

In 1944 he decided to go study photography and landed at the Design Laboratory, New School for Social Research in New York City.

I have discovered Richard Avedon in 2009 when I went to see an exhibit in San Francisco called Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946-2004.

He is one of the photographers I admire the most and his work inspired me to study photography.

His portraits, which are in part what made him become famous, were very minimalistic and he managed to show the true faces of his subjects, pulling of the masks and showing a deeper aspect of their personalities. 

The fashion photographs he made were very innovative at the time and he worked in an unconventional way. By doing so he changed the fashion world and the way we looked at it.

Because of the photographer Avedon was and the impact he had on photography, I have decided to dedicate this blog to him.

"If a day goes by without my doing something related to photography, it's as though I've neglected something essential to my existence, as though I had forgotten to wake up. I know that the accident of my being a photographer has made my life possible."

                                            -Richard Avedon