The work of legendary photographer Richard Avedon is the current exhibition at the WA Art Gallery.
It might seem surprising that until now there hasn’t been a major exhibition in Australia of the work of Avedon. Christopher Chapman Senior Curator at the National Portrait Gallery shares that very few of Avedon’s images are within any Australian collections, making this exhibition an extra special opportunity for Australian audiences.
“I think because Avedon’s work is so strongly associated with magazine work the presentation of it has been more through reproduction in magazines and books rather than being presented as prints for exhibition,” Chapman said explaining why we haven’t seen the photographer work in galleries.
“He had a very distinctive style that he developed in the late ‘60s, when people think of Avedon they think of a black and white photograph of a person standing against a white back drop.
“Something that Avedon was very interested in was trying to convey an essence of the person he was photographing, for him the way to do that was to strip away everything else, so you ended up with a very stark picture of a person and that invites quite an intimate relationship between the viewer and the photograph.”
Avedon’s portrait of writer Truman Capote (pictured) was taken when the writer was in his late 20s.
“It’s surprising,” Chapman said, ‘Because he looks so boyish. Avedon was great mates with Capote early on. When Capote was writing ‘In Cold Blood’ Avedon traveled with him and photographed the house and took some portraits of the two men who were accused of murdering the Clutter family.
“The photo shows quite a private side of Truman Capote. When I was doing research at the Avedon Foundation in New York they had some proof sheets from that photo shoot and that’s one image from a whole lot where Truman Capote is swaying and dancing around.”
Avedon career was quite diverse, his work wasn’t solely focused on artistic photography or the celebrity portraits, he also undertook a significant amount of commercial work including advertising campaigns for Calvin Klein and record covers for Whitney Houston, but it’s his work in the 1960’s for fashion magazine ‘Harper’s Bazaar’ that was quite groundbreaking.
“He brought to fashion photography a real flair,” Chapman said, “He took the fashion models out on to the streets, capturing them jumping over cobblestones, that was a really new way to present fashion at the time. One of his most famous fashion photography images, ‘Dovima with the Elephants’ is in the exhibition.”
The photographers success in the fashion world proved to be financially lucrative which allowed him to branch out and take on some more documentary focused projects throughout his life.
“One of these was a book, that he made with James Baldwin,” explains Chapman, “They went to High School together, the book was called ‘Nothing Personal’. Baldwin wrote the text and Avedon took the photos and they were photos of all levels of American society. There were photos of politicians, photos of people on the beach, pictures of inmates in a mental home… it was Avedon’s response to the social issues in America at the time. the entrenched racism, the constrictions on freedom of expression.”
Aside from working with homosexual writer Baldwin, the book also contained a picture of poet Allen Ginsberg and his lover Peter Orlovsky. Chapman describes the book as being met with a lot of hostility with many commentators criticising a fashion photographer for making social commentary.
Later in life Avedon had great success in documentary style photography with a series of photographs he titled ‘American West’. One of the most distinctive images in the exhibition is a photograph of a teenage boy holding a rattlesnake. It’s a massive image, with incredible detail.
“These images have become really iconic,” Chapman shared, “the image of the young boy skinning the rattlesnake is really extraordinary.
Richard Avedon People shares 80 images shot between 1949 and 2002. The exhibiiton is showing at the Art Galley of Western Australia from August 2 to 17 November. For all the details head to www.artgallery.wa.gov.au
Head online to www.outinperth for our full interview with Christopher Chapman.
Graeme Watson
Background Image: Truman Capote, writer, New York, May 6, 1957, Photograph by Richard Avedon, © The Richard Avedon Foundation
