I suspect that the youngish photographer was influenced by In Cold Blood the book in

I suspect that the youngish photographer was influenced by In Cold Blood, the book in Capote’s mind. Avedon was Capote’s buddy at the time of the murderers’ trial and the wild success of the non-fiction novel that described the Kansas killings. This is Capote on his ambitions at the time of Observations: “I wanted to produce a journalistic novel, something on a large scale that would have the credibility of fact, the immediacy of film, the depth and freedom of prose, and the precision of poetry.”Very like Avedon, except that neither man attained poetry. Here were pictures of Louis Armstrong, Ezra Pound, Carson McCullers, Bogart, Monroe and numerous others Accompanying comments were by Truman Capote The writer and the photographer had similar preoccupations. Real sensuality, one notices, has no place in Avedon’s work.His photography is enslaved to famous people, so his achievements ought to be in the field of celebrity portraiture I prefer his earlier work of this sort.

The best of it appeared in his book Observations, published in 1959. And just as Avedon’s magazines feature glamour and fame, so also their photography must be smart, newsy, just a little bit sexy. His photo- graphs are not successful if they stray from these formulae. The museum had become a magazine, and that’s also the purpose of the installation at the NPG.Clear, bright, monumental rather than illustrative images; large areas of brilliant white; bold black borders; pictures magisterially cropped by the photographer rather than by someone on the picture desk; chic contemporary typefaces; photographs spread over two pages or in a gatefold; above all an atmosphere of money and success – here are the elements of Avedon’s magazine style.

Charles Saumarez Smith, the new Director of the National Portrait Gallery, writes in the catalogue of his amazement when he saw the present show at the Cologne Kunsthalle, with prints enormously enlarged and stuck to the walls without frames But it wasn’t quite an aesthetic amazement It was the sight of the Kunsthalle’s transformation. We can’t pin down Avedon the man, the creative and feeling person, because he so involves us in the obsessions of his nation. Overwhelmingly, the theme of his work is the glamour, seedy or splendid, of American self-awareness.
From the first, Avedon has been involved with magazines, mostly at the richer end of the market He began with a special empathy for Harper’s Bazaar. Avedon’s first and most im-portant influence came from Alexey Brodovitch, art director at Harper’s, who was just as skilled with layout and typography as with the camera All Avedon’s later work reflects this training So do his exhibitions, which began as early as 1962. Surely his elusiveness is bound up with the public dramas of the subject matter.

Although he has a signature style, Avedon’s character is elusive. He’s fond of self-portraiture but has never printed and published intimate photographs of other people. I write that he has “approached” such branches of camerawork because he has never been committed to a single one of them. Documentary, portraiture, war photography, fashion, even paparazzi photography: all these have had a place in his imagination.

Furthermore, Avedon has ap-proached so many branches of the camera’s art. IF YOU had to choose just one photographer to illustrate the public concerns of American life since the last war, the chances are that you’d settle for Richard Avedon. You might not pick him happily or whole-heartedly, but you’d have the assurance that he’s covered so much transatlantic ground in the past 50 years. As Nils Bernstein, the publicist of Nirvana’s original record company, Sub Pop, said at the time: “His death is an ongoing event.”. It will sell millions.It’s easy enough to ignore funds and statues and books, the odd suicide, a few depressive songs and millions of depressive teenagers, but really the quiet revolution is still going on. Together they plan to sift through tapes and compile a Nirvana live album.