terryworld
Monday, February 26, 2007
Is Terry Richardson the antithesis of Richard Avedon, or his proper successor?
My series of commentaries on photography books continues this week with another look at Richardson's TerryWorld, a large volume of messy snapshots (or a messy volume of large snapshots?) that stands in apparent opposition to the precision and elegance of the many Avedon books with which it shares a bookcase. I wrote about Richard Avedon Portraits last week.
The possible similarities between Richardson and Avedon are mostly matters of discourse around the abstract idea of the fashion photographer: they are men with power over women, men with superpowered vision and sexuality, men with youthful sidekicks, men of adventure.
Or so the story goes...
But my proposed comparison is more than a formal or discursive one. If we agree to conceive of Avedon as a patriarchal figure in comparison to Richardson, then we must also deal with the question of Richardson's biological father and his relationship to Avedon. Bob Richardson was a successful fashion photographer in the 1960s, and according to some accounts, one whose salacious energy was a provocation to Avedon. Apparently, the older Richardson could motivate fashion models to do things that were outside of Avedon's internally constructed bounds. In the end, Avedon's practices are about photography more than sex, but the Richardson DNA appears to be about sex more than photography.
Among both the younger Richardson's advocates and his critics, the conventional discourse about the younger Richardson's practice is one of pornography, but his images are more properly examined as visual evidence of an evolving postmodernity and its bodily expression.
For those to whom Richardon appeals, and who participate in his photographic scenes most exuberantly, the body's essential role in determining the boundary between identity and otherness is being dismantled or discarded. More properly, the notion that a boundary between identity and otherness is necessary, desirable or even possible is being undermined by the grinding of contemporary mass culture against the relics of modernist theories of the unified self.
"The point is that you can't get at the thing itself, the real nature of the sitter, by stripping away the surface," Avedon said, in a philosophical perspective that I find very comforting. "The surface is all you've got. You can only get beyond the surface by working with the surface."
What Avedon fails to deal with is this question: does there even need to be a surface? Are stripping or invulnerability really the only options? I find the implications of those questions unsettling to my own sense of embodiment.
But Richardson doesn't.
In most cases, Richardson's photographs do not appeal to me. I own TerryWorld, and I keep it around as an intellectual challenge to myself, but there are only a handful of images that evoke any kind of pleasure in me, and they are those that are most Avedonian in formal approach.
Avedon's preferred technology for making a model the unambiguous signifier of a portrait was the white background, and Richardson gestures toward the same bleaching of context with his photographs of exposed bodies against unadorned walls and doorways. Both photographers invoke expressionist painter Egon Schiele at the moments that pierce me most sharply.
posted by fogged @ 12:21 PM