Veruschka, Richard Avedon & Polly Mellen
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Veruschka in perhaps the Most Epic Fashion Story

In 1966 Vogue did something extraordinary: a team was to Japan in the middle of winter to shoot perhaps the most epic fashion story of all time. The editorial was pre- PETA and it was dedicated to the beauty of furs. 

Richard Avedon

Fashion photographer Richard Avedon’s life was far from glamorous

Raquel Lanei

October 17, 2020

It was easy to envy — even hate — Richard Avedon.

The legendary photographer, who died in 2004, traveled around the world shooting the most fabulous fashions, the most magnificent models, the most scintillating stars. He hobnobbed with Leonard Bernstein, Truman Capote, Audrey Hepburn, Lauren Hutton. His artistic peers — shutterbugs like Robert Frank and Lee Friedlander — as well as critics scoffed or seethed at his lavishness, his four-story townhouse, fancy museum shows and commercial ad work. It didn’t help that he could be self-aggrandizing, with his expensive, overstuffed coffee table books and blown-up, larger-than-life prints.

Alain Elkann interviews Richard Avedon

Richard Avedon

by Alain Elkann

From Napalm to Beautiful Women.

Richard Avedon is a small man. His face is sunken in and he hides behind his white mane of hair and large tortoise-shell glasses. He is dressed in black velvet and has shiney shoes. He’s in the middle of the Sala delle Cariatidi in the Palazzo Reale in Milan explaining how an image of his is to be hung. Together we walk through the rooms of his exhibition (to be inaugurated on 17 January 1995 and running through 5 March, with Kodak and Versace as sponsors). The show is called Evidence (1944 – 1994). He asks for a coffee, a bottle of mineral water, and a piece of gianduiotto (a chocolate and hazelnut candy from Piedmont).

Richard Avedon / Nothing Personal

 

Richard Avedon

RICHARD AVEDON: NOTHING PERSONAL

 New York—Pace Gallery and Pace/MacGill Gallery are honored to announce their representation of The Richard Avedon Foundation with an exhibition of Richard Avedon’s photographs and extensive archival materials drawn from Nothing Personal, Avedon’s 1964 collaboration with James Baldwin. This will be the first comprehensive presentation of this period of Avedon’s work and will be on view at 537 West 24th Street from November 17, 2017 through January 13, 2018. To coincide with the occasion, TASCHEN will republish a facsimile edition of Nothing Personal with an accompanying booklet containing a new introduction by Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Hilton Als and rare and unpublished Avedon photographs.Native New Yorkers Richard Avedon (1923-2004) and James Baldwin (1924-1987) met as students at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx in the late 1930s. They became friends while writing for and editing The Magpie, the school’s literary magazine. Even as teenagers, they, in their writing, dealt with profound issues of race, mortality, and, as Avedon wrote, “the future of humanity” as World War II closed in on them.

Art, Fashion, Sex / Richard Avedon’s Bohemian Coming of Age

Richard Avedon

Art, Fashion, Sex: Richard Avedon’s Bohemian Coming of Age

Making his name in the fashion world, the legendary portraitist and his creative contemporaries were forecasting the future of the culture—and the modern American woman.

BY PHILIP GEFTER

SEPTEMBER 28, 2020

Richard Avedon and his young wife, Doe, had no idea what they were getting into when they agreed to take a beach-house share in the summer of 1946 with his boss at Harper’s Bazaar, Lillian Bassman, and her husband, photographer Paul Himmel, in Cherry Grove, a community of bohemian intellectuals on Fire Island, 90 minutes outside of New York City. The slender barrier island, dotted with scrub and brush and dunes, was reachable only by public ferry or private boat (cars were not allowed). During the day, when the sun was out, the shimmering reflections on the ocean to the south and the glassy waters of the Great South Bay to the north created a unique and astonishing kind of light.

The Nude In Vogue / Part I

Photo by Irving Penn

The Nude In Vogue

Complete Special Edition Winter 2012 

Part I

When I first saw this cover of Vogue Russia’s special edition ‘The Nude In Vogue’ my jaw dropped. It’s impossible that such an edition would be published in America — even if the presidential election has ended. America’s social conservatives would bust into Anna Wintour’s office and set her on fire — preparing to burn her at the stake like in the Salem Witch trials. 

So the Russians have done something the Americans would not. While Carine Roitfeld would delight in such a project, there is no way that present day editor-in-chief Emmanuelle Alt would undertake such an endeavor.

Helmut Newton may be the master of female eroticism and nudity, but many photographers have interpreted nudity and sensuality within their own distinct vocabulary. If I’m not mistaken ‘The Nude In Vogue’ has no female photographers, and it is an omission worth noting. At AOC, we are devoted to having a relevant and honest confrontation with our bodies, the world of fashion and its influence on our self-image, and also flogging and the world of sexual politics.

I was recently at an art opening and when I mentioned that Anne of Carversville tells women’s stories “from fashion to flogging”, he said “You mean BDSM?” Sighing, I said “no”. I speak of the 40,000 women flogged each year in a certain country that will be nameless this moment lest I corrupt their cause in Google search with all these images. These women are deemed immoral for wearing trousers that aren’t baggy enough, and are flogged by the same crowds of men who oggle and masturbate to images of naked women online.

As women we deal with all these complexities of the male mind, and frequently hang our heads in shame and self-loathing. This is why I’m posting these images in AOC Body. They are all filtered for the search engines, so as not to corrupt young minds or men at work.

Many of my favorites are included in this overview of nudes. Besides Newton, we have Irving Penn, Horst P. Horst, Mario Sorrenti, Herb Ritts and MIkael Jansson. To be honest, I haven’t had time to review all the images in ‘The Nude In Vogue’. I will do so in the coming days and return to this critical subject for women. I want to give a special thanks to ‘The Libertine’ blog for doing what I refused to have my team do. It was a heck of a job to separate all these images from the pdf, so thanks Libertine. We’ve divided the editorial overview into three parts.

~ Anne Carversville

George Hoyningen-Huene

Paul Wolff

Arnold Genthe

Richard Avedon / The Photographer

Richard Avedon

THE PHOTOGRAPHER

“My portraits are more about me than they are about the people I photograph.”

Richard Avedon

Richard Avedon’s fashion and portrait photographs helped define America’s image of style, beauty and culture for the last half of the 20th century.

Mr. Avedon’s photographs captured the freedom, excitement and energy of fashion as it entered an era of transformation and popularization. No matter what the prevailing style, his camera eye always found a way to dramatize its spirit as the fashion world’s creative attention swayed variously from the “New Look” of liberated Paris to pragmatic American sportswear designed in New York, and from the anti-establishment fashion of London’s Carnaby Street to sophisticated, tailored dresses and suits from Milan.

NY Times 

Avedon’s women leaped off curbs, roller-skated on the Place de la Concorde, and kicked up their heels in nightclubs, animated by the freedom of the postwar era, the frivolity of youth, and the fabulousness of fashion.

The Avedon Years: Harper’s BAZAAR 

http://www.modernartandstyle.com/2012/03/06/richard-avedon-the-photographer/