Richard Avedon, the New York photographer whose signature pictures of glamorous models romping in high couture clothing revolutionized the fashion industry and helped set American style for more than five decades, died yesterday. He was 81.
Avedon, who during his long career worked for such trendy magazines as Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and The New Yorker, died at Methodist Hospital in San Antonio, Texas, after suffering a brain hemorrhage last month while on assignment.
He had been working on a project for The New Yorker called "On Democracy," which had taken him around the country for several months shooting politicians, delegates and ordinary people along the campaign trail. New Yorker editor David Remnick said he hoped to publish the project before Election Day, Nov. 2.
In addition to his fashion work, Avedon was celebrated for his stark, black-and-white portraits of celebrities and political figures, whose faces he rendered with an unflinching realism that hinted at the ordinary human reality behind the public facade.
His photographs of entertainers such as Marilyn Monroe, Bob Dylan and Marian Anderson became icons of the era.
"Avedon was able to capture people's greatness by showing their vulnerabilities," said Darsie Alexander, a curator in the prints, drawings and photography department at the Baltimore Museum of Art.
"People think about the slick surfaces of his fashion photographs but Avedon was really all about substance," Alexander noted. "His work had to do with showing that beauty is about flaws and vulnerabilities. The greatest people are the ones who are able to show both their strength and their weakness, and Avedon was able to combine those two things to make extraordinary pictures of people."
In An Autobiography, Richard Avedon (1993), Avedon once described what he saw in many of the famous faces he photographed: "People - running from unhappiness, hiding in power - are locked within their reputations, ambitions, beliefs."
By contrast, Avedon's exuberant fashion shots helped redefine the genre as an art form in the 1950s, when he liberated his models and their frothy garments by setting them in motion - jumping, leaping or striding toward the viewer with confident purposefulness.
His approach contrasted sharply with the static, rigid, art deco-style tableaux of earlier masters such as Edward Steichen, Cecil Beaton and Baron Adolphe De Meyer, whose work looked painfully old-fashioned in comparison with Avedon's joyful, up-to-the minute confections.
