The Man Who Spoke Style to Truth

• Share

Richard Avedon, who died last week at 81, used the camera as an all-terrain vehicle. The terrain he crossed was the human form, the social fabric and that permanent terra incognita, the human face. A man so stylish could never escape being dismissed as merely stylish, as though he weren't quite worthy of the name artist. Yes, his black-and-white portraits against a stark white background made the truth seem hip. All the same, you only had to stand before his unblinking portrait of President Dwight Eisenhower, a dwindling old warrior. If art is a word we use to describe things that tell us what we must know, about life and time and death, art was the only word that would do.

Before he became a man capable of taking those pictures, Avedon transformed fashion photography. Certainly he knew about elegance. His portrait of Marella Agnelli, with its plain sources in the swan-necked women of 16th century Mannerism, tells you that. But in the pages of Harper's Bazaar and Vogue he undid decades of the simply fashionable. What he offered in place of the chic was cheek. In one giddy series of pictures from 1962, he had Suzy Parker, one of the first supermodels, high-stepping it around Paris with Mike Nichols, a funny young couple on the run, at a time when fashion photography was still largely a matter of subdued, immobile poses. By the time he photographed Penelope Tree in midair, midair seemed like the natural place for anybody to be.

Avedon was also a peerless celebrity photographer. He knew that every portrait was a performance but that the performance could be a passage to something true. His picture of an exhausted, tentative Marilyn Monroe is an essential window into the sum of her predicaments. His shot of Charlie Chaplin making devil's-horns at the camera is an object lesson in economical wit. Accusations of communist sympathies were pushing Chaplin away from America; Avedon gives us the funnyman trying on his new role, the bogeyman.

Avedon had started his career in the merchant marine, taking identity card shots. Years later, the bare format of an ID became an inspiration for his mature portrait style, one of the great aesthetic insights of the 20th century. It consisted of high-focus inspection of unsmiling faces against an arctic-white background. Under that light, the body capitulates. Every line and facial sag announces itself. He used that approach to photograph everyone from Abbie Hoffman to Rose Kennedy. But these pictures were not cruel. They were fearless, lucid and unsentimental. As a fashion photographer, Avedon took human vanity to heights even human vanity never dreamed of. As a portraitist, he brought us all back down to earth.