richard avedon portraits
Monday, February 19, 2007
At first glance, Richard Avedon Portraits seems rather like a pleasant summary of the exhibition it accompanied, Avedon's 2002 portrait retrospective at the Met. It is a bit more substantial than a postcard, but weighing in at only 50 images, it is perhaps a bit too slight to carry the weight of Avedon's long career. The exhibition itself was only lightly salted with recent portraits by Avedon, and the book contains only one that did not appear in any of Avedon's previous books.
However, there are three elements of this book that appear to have drawn little comment by Avedon's many critics and advocates.
New York Magazine's Mark Stevens landed on one of them in his review for the exhibit: the significance of Avedon's 1975 portrait of sculptor June Leaf. This photograph appears on a cover of the catalog, but I was struck most sharply by its apparent importance to Avedon based on its central position at the entrance to the gallery. I did not recall having seen the photograph prior to that, but its presence imprinted itself sharply on me when I first saw it at the Met.
"There is no question who dominates this congregation," Stevens wrote at the time. "Leaf is the Village Modonna. This is the Passion of the artist."
Leaf is married to photographer Robert Frank, portraits of whom made on the same day appear in both the exhibition and catalog. Taken as a set with other white background portraits of the mid-1970s, Avedon's creative run-up to In The American West seems clear.
Avedon has often been accused of a lack of compassion for his later portrait-making practices, but the photograph of Leaf achieves exactly the kind of sympathetic human connection that Avedon's most vehement critics claim he lacks, and here is further evidence to support its importance to him: of the ten books published by Avedon since he made the photograph, it appears in six.
The photograph is also one that answers another common criticism of Avedon, that his photography is a practice of low sensationalism embossed by high technique. Leaf performs a kind of rich femininity that seems far removed from Avedon's fashion images, but which also holds its own against Avedon's representational power.
Reviews and descriptions of the book also nearly always describe the folio binding of the book, but none appear to have ever asked why. For a powerful and controlling personality such as Avedon's, it seems improbable that he would have chosen the folio format just for its novelty, and I believe that the physical design of the book represents a philosophical interrogation of the structural norms of the photographic book.
After decades working and reworking practices of photographic montage defined by the structural constraint of the two-page magazine spread, Avedon conceived the cinematic thread of his portraits in a physical form that resembles a strip of film as much as a series of pages.
I stretched the book out to its fullest length the other day, and I expected to learn something about the nature of the sequence itself, about the way that subgroups of images in the narrative might subvert the conventional boundaries of the printed page. What I found instead was the raw material of an Avedonian Mobius strip, a two-sided narrative that connects end-to-end and begins again.
One side of the strip is a sequence of Avedon's white background portraits, and the other is dominated by the written content of the catalog, including essays by Avedon and by exhibition curators Maria Hambourg and Mia Fineman. Which brings me to another unremarked aspect of the book: its unambiguous reinvocation of Portraits, Avedon's fourth book, published in 1976.
Accompanying Harold Rosenberg's introductory essay in the original title are a number of Avedon's most famous photographs, including Marilyn Monroe, Ezra Pound and Dick and Walter Hickock. The same basic cast of characters composed in basically the same way also accompanies Hambourg and Fineman's essay. In the same vein, many of Avedon's white background portraits are repeated in both volumes
Why would Avedon do this? One might be tempted to believe that Avedon is trying to hit us over the head with evidence of his own history and accomplishments. I prefer to think of it as a deconstructive gesture that invokes a Derridean notion of iterability & meaning, a concept best explained in English by Jonathan Culler or Michael Benedikt. A detailed analysis of the interrelationship of Avedon's narrative practices and Derrida's theories of language and meaning would be a rich one, I think, but also one deserving more space than a conventional blog post.
posted by fogged @ 11:17 AM