In 1960 Richard Avedon photographed the poet W. H. Auden on St. Mark’s Place, New York, in the middle of a snow storm. A few passers-by and buildings are visible to the left of the frame but the blizzard is in the process of freezing Auden in the midst of what is meteorologically termed “a white-out.” Avedon had by then already patented his signature approach to portraiture, so it is tempting to see this picture as a God-given endorsement of his habit of isolating people against a sheer expanse of white, as evidence that his famously severe technique is less a denial of naturalism than its apotheosis.
Auden is shown full-length, bundled up in something that seems a cross between an old-fashioned English duffle coat and a prototype of the American anorak. Avedon, in this image, keeps his distance. More usually his sitters (who are rarely permitted the luxury of a seat) are subjected to a visual interrogation that quite literally flies in the face of Auden’s ideas of good photographic manners:
It is very rude to take close-ups and, except
when enraged, we don’t:
lovers, approaching to kiss,
instinctively shut their eyes before their faces
can be reduced to
anatomical data.
Avedon’s critics allege that this is what he did consistently and deliberately: reduced faces to anatomical data. At the very least, as Truman Capote happily observed, Avedon was interested in “the mere condition of a face.” If this had the quality of disinterested inquiry, others claimed that his impulses were crueler, more manipulative—an opinion that Avedon occasionally confirmed. In 1957 he caught the Duke and Duchess of Windsor recoiling from the world as if it were a perfectly bloody little place. According to Diane Arbus, this result was achieved by Avedon explaining that on the way to the shoot his taxi ran over a dog. As the Windsors flinched with sympathetic horror, he clicked the shutter.
It has also been suggested that the photographs of crumpled, aging faces were in some way Avedon’s revenge on the fashion and glamour business in which he made his name, an explicit rebuke to the claim that his work was all surface and no depth. This opposition cannot long be sustained. As Avedon rightly insisted, “The surface is all you’ve got. You can only get beyond the surface by working with the surface.” And the movement between the two activities, between fashion and portraiture, was in any case constant and mutually informing.
A little detour, via French street photography, will show how.
Jacques-Henri Lartigue’s photographs have exactly the unposed, felicitous spontaneity that made Robert Doisneau’s later image of a Parisian couple kissing immediately appealing. As is now well known, The Kiss was deliberately choreographed by the photographer. In this transition, from the happy accidents of Lartigue to the premeditated charm of Doisneau, we can see one of the two contradictory but complementary impulses that have also animated the history of fashion photography. The unposed becomes the template for a pose; the miracle of the unguarded moment is always being turned into a style and a commodity.
Evidence of the other, contrary movement is also found throughout the history of fashion photography. An established way of photographing models or clothes becomes too artificial, too static, too posed. Then someone comes along and, through a combination of ambition, daring, and vision, injects an element of spontaneity, naturalness. Take any of the famous names in the history of fashion photography and the chances are you will discover that they once offered a liberating alternative to the staid, that they wanted “to get away from the piss elegance of it all” (not Bailey, as you might imagine, but Beaton!) or felt like “a street savage surrounded by sophisticates” (Irving Penn!). The peculiar twist of fashion photography is that this “naturalness” is either achieved by—or immediately creates the conditions for—further contrivance. It cannot be otherwise, for the effect the images are ultimately intended to create (a willingness, desire, or aspiration to purchase the stuff the models are wearing) precedes and has priority over what is randomly discovered.
This is why any discussion of fashion photography comes, inevitably, back to Avedon, who tirelessly and inventively raised the bar of contrived naturalness. One sees this nakedly in Laura Wilson’s photographs of Avedon at work on the portraits of drifters and workers collected in In the American West: lights, assistants, and blank white paper cut off his subjects from their natural habitat more completely than the bars of a zoo. Thus confined, they are granted an anonymous kind of celebrity, ostensibly because Avedon was a photographer with an instantly recognizable style; more subtly, because the cumulative effect of ruthless stripping away is not simply to lay bare. Revelation is also a means of generation.
What, then, is being generated?
In the work of David Octavius Hill and his contemporaries, Walter Benjamin was struck by the way that “light struggles out of darkness.” Benjamin went on to describe how, from about 1850 to 1880, the client was confronted with a “technician of the latest school,” whereas the photographer was confronted by a “member of a rising class equipped with an aura that had seeped into the very folds of the man’s frock coat or floppy cravat.” Benjamin was adamant that the aura was not simply the product of primitive technology. Rather, in that early period, subject and technique were “exactly congruent.” This lasted only a short while, for “soon advances in optics made instruments available that put darkness entirely to flight and recorded appearances as faithfully as any mirror.” As a result the aura was “banished from the picture with the rout of darkness through faster and faster lenses.”
With Avedon—“that wonderful, terrible mirror,” as Cocteau called him—the wheel came full circle. Absolute whiteness took the place of the darkness against which the light had struggled to emerge. And in this renewed and reversed congruence of subject and technique, a new aura and order emerged, one based on the reciprocity of fame. A famous photographer takes pictures of famous people (people whose aura has seeped into their cravats—or shirts, or dresses—and whose aura, in the kind of inversion beloved by the Frankfurt school, is often the product of the cravats or shirts or dresses which they have been paid to model and which he has been paid to photograph). In the 1960s and 1970s, according to Diane Arbus’s biographer Patricia Bosworth, “everybody who entered Avedon’s studio was some kind of star.” Thereafter, even if you weren’t famous when you went in, you sort of were when you came out. Either way, a portrait of oneself by Avedon was a highly personalized status symbol. Okay, he might make your face look, as the British comedian Les Dawson said of his mother-in-law, “like a bag of spanners,” but the photograph had the quality of—in fact was a record of—election. To be photographed by Avedon thus afforded a double means of recognition. Consequently people turned up for their session as if for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity—almost, as the saying goes, for a rendezvous with destiny.
Again this connects Avedon with nineteenth-century photographers such as Julia Margaret Cameron (with whom he felt a special affinity). Back then, according to Benjamin, everything about the elaborate procedure of having one’s picture taken “caused the subject to focus his life in the moment rather than hurrying on past it; during the considerable period of the exposure the subject as it were grew into the picture.” In these pictures, “the very creases in people’s clothes have an air of permanence.” Avedon, of course, worked with split-second exposure times but the results were in some ways even more striking: the creases in people’s faces have an air of geological permanence. There is the sense, often, of a massive extent of time being compressed into the moment the picture was taken. “Lately,” he said in 1970, “I’ve become interested in the passage of time within a photograph.” So, in one of his most famous portraits, Isak Dinesen looks like she was once the most beautiful woman in the world—about two thousand years ago.
It’s a picture which makes one think of the Sybil who asked for immortality while forgetting to ask for eternal youth. For his part, Avedon wondered if people came to him in the same way they might go to a fortune teller. (He was not alone in this: André Breton, Bill Brandt, and Diane Arbus also believed the photographer should attempt to conjure a likeness which, in Brandt’s words, “physically and morally predicts the subject’s entire future.”) If that’s the case, then Avedon’s prophecies are self-fulfilling and self-revealing. Character is fate. Or maybe that should read character is face. George Orwell famously claimed that by a certain age everyone gets the face he deserves; Martin Amis updated this, insisting that nowadays everyone gets the face he or she can afford. In America this might seem like a quaintly British distinction: you deserve what you can afford. As far as Avedon was concerned, everyone’s face got photographed the same way regardless (we’ll return to that word shortly). Fame, face, and fate were—give or take a consonant—all synonyms of each other. It was a credo that kept faith, simultaneously, with the hierarchy of glamour and the leveling gaze of biological destiny. Looking at his photographs, we have the distinct sense that what is being uniquely revealed is, as Milan Kundera puts it in Immortality, “the non-individuality, the impersonality of a face.”
“The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features,” Kundera goes on. “It reflects neither the character nor the soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen.” Hence the impossible contradiction whereby the devastating pictures in which Avedon’s dying father seems to be dissolving into—or being reclaimed by—the white radiance of the backdrop show, according to his son, “what it is to be any one of us.”
It was inevitable that, despite his undimmed energy and enthusiasm, Avedon succumbed to a kind of rote. In his last years, as house photographer for The New Yorker, he sometimes seemed to be running on empty. He never lost the appetite for discovery but he kept discovering the same thing. The photographer who wished he “just could work with [his] eyes alone” was so highly regarded that he was able, in a quite literal sense, to carry on regard-less. Even so, when he died, the huge swath of his work, the sheer number of specimens he had scrutinized over time, suggested that it was not just an individual who had passed away. An era came to an end, too: the era when—at the risk of being tautologous—it was possible to be photographed by Avedon. At that moment, the means of recognition were altered and diminished, permanently.
Geoff Dyer’s most recent book is Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. He wrote about photography in his previous book, The Ongoing Moment.
