Born On This Day- May 15th... Photographer Richard Avedon

"All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth."

Richard Avedon

Self Portrait

What do Jean Genet, Jimmy Durante, Brigitte Bardot, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jacques Cousteau, Andy Warhol, & Lena Horne have in common? They are just a few of the many personalities caught on film by photographer Richard Avedon. For 50+ years, Avedon’s portraits have filled the pages of the country’s best magazines. His stark imagery & brilliant insight into his subjects’ characters has made him one of the most important American portrait photographers.

I am a fan photography, with a special weakness for 20th century photographers. I find myself returning to various images over & over. I have always been captivated by Richard Avedon's ability to tell a story in a deceptively simple photo. I always wanted him to do the cover for my early album from 1970- Candy Coated Codine, Cognac, Consolation & Cowboys.


Avedon was among the first to challenge the conventional boundaries between studio photography & reportage. Some of his portraits: a young Bob Dylan standing in the rain, Marilyn Monroe caught in a vulnerable moment, Andy Warhol & his Factory crew, are the most iconic of the 20th century.

His daring style rejected conventional poses & instead captured both motion & emotion in the faces of his subjects, catching the intrigue in a single honest moment.


From his breakthrough Paris fashion work in the 1950s; his portrait of American counterculture in the 1960s & 1970s; his Reagan era series, with an emphasis on ordinary people living in the western United States; & his portraits of the nation's most influential people, his work live on.

Along with his work in the magazine industry, Avedon has collaborated on a number of books of portraits. In 1959 he worked with Truman Capote on a book that documented some of the most famous & important people of the century. Observations included images of Buster Keaton, Gloria Vanderbilt, Pablo Picasso, Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, Frank Lloyd Wright, & Mae West.

In the early 1960s he began a series of images of patients in mental hospitals. Replacing the environment of the studio with that of the hospital ,he could recreate the genius of his other portraits with non-celebrities. The brutal reality of the lives of the insane was a bold contrast to his other work. In the 1980s & 1990s he would mover from his celebrity portraits to a series of studio images of drifters, carnival workers, & working class Americans.


Richard Avedon was born in 1923 in NYC to Russian Jewish parents; he died in 2004 of a cerebral hemorrhage in San Antonio, Texas, where he was on assignment for The New Yorker.