In Avedon's photos, the famous and the unknown are fashionable

We are all top fashion models! A hundred years ago, Walt Whitman claimed that the very ordinariness of people made them part of the "divine average." Twenty-odd years ago, Andy Warhol, master of numb mediocrity, could predict that someday advances in the media would mean that everyone would have 15 minutes of fame -- which is, of course, worse than oblivion.

But Richard Avedon, perhaps the greatest contemporary American photographer, knows that we are all top fashion models. We are not average. We are not numb. We are all dressed in the shocking clothes of the soul. We all wear the latest designer wrinkles. We are all swathed in the highest-priced light. We are all geniuses at posing and selling ourselves. We are all persecuted by our own glamour.

Richard Avedon, at 71, is at the tipsy freezing peak of American fame. He either has it all or he has nothing. For 50 years, he has been famous for taking pictures of the famous and the weird. People magazine loves him as much as New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Whitney Museum of American Art has just put on a massive retrospective of Mr. Avedon's often more-than-gigantic photographs; and now Random House, in collaboration with Eastman Kodak, has come out with "Evidence 1944-1994," a kind of catalog-biography to accompany the Whitney exhibition.

While continuing the glittering grind of commercial work for television and magazines, Mr. Avedon has now become the staff photographer for the once staid, now hopped-up New Yorker. In the same tolerant issue, one may see Mr. Avedon's suavely wild ad for "Gianni Versace" clothes alongside his noble portrait of poet W. H. Auden in the snow.

Moreover, just as Mr. Avedon has smashed the Berlin Wall between commercial and "serious" work, so he smashed the wall between past and present, private and public. For the New Yorker is bravely mixing Mr. Avedon's old and new work, his private and public obsessions. Mr. Avedon's images are our images. What he carries in his obsessive head becomes our obsession.

The fashionable becomes our shared nightmare, our shared dream. Is Mr. Avedon the pimp who sells "Calvin Klein" jeans stuffed with Brooke Shields? Is he the side-show barker who presents Natassja Kinski dressed only in a snake? Or is he the Homer who sings of our modern, fatally gorgeous Helens, the current Walt Whitman who swims our tide of contemporary lives? Mr. Avedon may even be our jazz poet of New York who swiftly writes in light. But is he everything or nothing? Is he hot or cold? Is America joy or despair? Is America hot or cold?