Visual Mayhem
By John Durniak
Since he began taking pictures 33 years ago, Richard Avedon has been making shock waves with his camera. He was a highly innovative fashion photographer for Harper's Bazaar and Vogue, snapping his models in the midst of wild-eyed elephants or striding in the rain. But it was his still and startlingly somber portraiture of celebrities and friends that established him, along with Andre Kertesz, Irving Penn, Henri Cartier-Bresson, W. Eugene Smith and Ansel Adams, as one of the most important photographers in the world.
His current show at the Marlborough Gallery in Manhattan chronicles much of the Avedon graphic revolution. It is also Avedon's formal move into what was once the private domain of painters--print selling at prices ranging from $75 to $1,800 for limited editions.
No Guarantee. The Avedon show is highly personal and varied. It includes a 1949 portrait only 8 in. square of a smiling, unshaven, squinting Frank Lloyd Wright, a gigantic group portrait of the Chicago Seven, and a photo of a heavily made-up transvestite with a ballerina's tutu and a hairy chest.
The show does mayhem to the visual sense. The viewer is clobbered by an eye-level row of genitals, part of an 8-ft. by 30-ft. nude portrait of Andy Warhol and members of The Factory. Only a few steps away hangs a portrait of President Eisenhower, a crumpled, empty man. It is an assault on the image of Eisenhower that we carry in our minds--the formal Karsh portrait, the White House handout, and the hundreds of others.
No one who appears before the Avedon camera gets a guarantee of sympathetic treatment. Ezra Pound is captured as a tortured soul. Avedon is gentle with Marilyn Monroe, but Oscar Levant is shown as a fading Neanderthal man. The 40-ft.-wide mural of the eleven-member American Mission Council to Saigon (TIME, April 21) during the Viet Nam War (including General Creighton W. Abrams and Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker) can be used as a Rorschach test, asking the viewer to make a judgment of the members' guilt or innocence.
Dark Edges. Like Cartier-Bresson, Avedon gives us everything he and the lens record, including the dark edges of the film itself. This sharp edge forces the eye inward to the details effaces and nuances of expression. Avedon's pictures are lean, made with soft daylight and bouncelight against a white, seamless background. They are also stark because of the moment that Avedon tries to capture, as in the 1955 picture of a youthful Truman Capote. He reads the eyes of his subjects, waiting for that second when they reveal the facet of character he wants: he allows an older puffy-faced Capote to stare dully past the viewer; he confronts Igor Stravinsky eyeball to eyeball; and he has Sculptor June Leaf look through him.
This show is not Avedon under full throttle. It is in black and white only (although in his advertising and fashion work he is a master of color). The multi-image strips from the Manhattan Project Co.'s play Alice in Wonderland that greet visitors at the gallery entrance are mostly weak pictures. And Avedon, one of the keen observers of the sexual revolution in America, only toys with what he could have said on the subject.
Despite such reservations, the new, mature Avedon seen in this show remains extraordinary. One of his colleagues once said that Avedon was the white mechanical rabbit that all other photographers tried to catch but never did. The rabbit is out on the track again, and he is still ahead of the rest of the field. John Durniak
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