Bleak Chic

By Richard Lacayo

No matter what else goes on in Richard Avedon's portraits, it is the white backgrounds we remember first. Especially in the 1960s and '70s, when his up- against-the-wall pictures of celebrities and politicians started to appear in quantity, that bare radiance certified them as both aesthetically resolute and bang up-to-the-minute -- like hard-edged Minimalist painting -- and open to all kinds of understandings. Was that the chic white space of fashion magazines we were seeing? The Modernist's realm of purified spirit? The Existentialist's blank slate? Whatever it was, it seemed the mark of some supremely brave and urbane disposition located somewhere between Albert Camus and Diana Vreeland.

Just where exactly has been the crux of the Avedon question ever since. For much of his career, the photographer has been at pains to remind everyone that despite their superabundance of glamour -- and there is something in his style that can make even the grayest, most sinister suits of the Nixon years look swank -- his pictures have far deeper sources and purposes. At 70, with "Evidence: Richard Avedon 1944-1994," the retrospective of his work that opens on March 24 at the Whitney Museum in New York City -- it travels from there to Europe, Minneapolis and Los Angeles -- he is determined to consolidate, once and for all, his reputation as an artist of consequence, in the same league as Bill Brandt or Cartier-Bresson or, for that matter, a painter like Francis Bacon.

Don't imagine that it's easy for Avedon to make his case. While half the world is prepared to tell you he's a genius, the other half is always ready to call him slick. It doesn't necessarily help your reputation as an artist to have made your name doing fashion shoots, to have directed Calvin Klein commercials and to be, as Avedon is now, the first and only staff photographer of the suddenly trend-conscious New Yorker. Not everybody is inclined to entertain claims of seriousness from a man so at home in the counting house of status that is Manhattan, or one whose life has been so glamorous that Hollywood turned it into Funny Face (starring Fred Astaire as "Dick Avery").

So much the worse that when Avedon turned from Chanel gowns to portraits of the battered heroes of high culture and the Chicago Seven, he arrived at a signature look so contemporary -- so crisp and detailed, so coolly impassive and yet so in-your-face before the term was born -- it seemed to say moral seriousness was not only a virtue, it was hip. A sustaining faith in some quarters, that idea has always been anathema to others. Critics on the right called Avedon radical chic; those on the left dismissed him as chic, period.

It may have been partly to pre-empt those lines of attack that the Whitney show, which was organized by the photography historian Jane Livingston, includes hardly any of Avedon's fashion photography. And there is something valuable about looking at Avedon's work apart from what we know about the charmed kid who blew into the offices of Harper's Bazaar in the late 1940s and set the superexotic Dovima against a trio of dancing pachyderms. Nevertheless, Avedon the mordant portraitist cannot be understood without reference to Avedon the fashion photographer. From his work for Harper's and Vogue he learned how much of what goes on in front of a lens is sheer performance, and he learned the extent to which a photographer can draw out of that performance just what he wants.

When Avedon brought this knowledge to portraiture, he unsettled people who suppose a camera captures the psychological truths of the sitter. To the contrary, an Avedon portrait is just as likely to be a record of the photographer's preoccupations and psychic distresses, in which the sitter plays an unknowing part. If his portraits are psychological studies, the psychology is his, and that, he admits, is why so many of them are so gloomy.

If they were no more than projections of the photographer's own dilemmas, Avedon's pictures would be less compelling than they are. His portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Samuel Beckett command attention because's Monroe's baffled abjection and Beckett's quiet endurance correspond to states of mind familiar enough to most people. And the affectless pictures of oil-rig workers and cowboys and drifters that Avedon made in the western U.S., a place that still holds some of its mythic power as a land of opportunity, are a powerful representation of everyone's worst fears of disappointment.

Adam Gopnik, a writer for the New Yorker, is exactly right when he says, in an essay in the catalog, that "the theatricality of Avedon's work" is not a barrier to authenticity but rather the path to a different kind of truth, which it reaches by inventing "a set of heightened poetic conventions." Avedon has never been interested in observing the rules of straight photography, in which the most honest picture is one that has been fooled with the least. He crops and retouches; he coaxes the sitter and takes multiple shots until the subject's self-presentation matches some need of his own. More recently he's been combining three or four negatives in a seamless collage technique that produces what appears to be a single picture. Even when he seems to be following rules, he can be subverting them. The intense clarity of his portraits gives them the appearance of a documentary record, yet these are highly wrought -- and expensive -- art objects intended to serve Avedon's personal ends.

Among those ends is to convey the unwelcome news that the body capitulates over time, a task for which Avedon's icy style is ideal. Seen in his deadly light, the mortification of the flesh never looked so mortifying as in his portrait of Dorothy Parker, taken after she had steeped herself for decades in martinis and her own bile. Yet put aside the thought that she was rattling herself to pieces, and the very lines of her droopy complexion are as weirdly captivating as strange tattoos. Even if Avedon never had in mind Rilke's claim that "beauty's nothing/but the start of terror we can hardly bear," he knows something about it.

In 1989 Avedon brought his camera to the Berlin Wall on the nights that thousands of people gathered on either side to celebrate its fall. The Whitney retrospective ends with the pictures he made there. Strobe-lit crowd shots full of wild spirits, they hint that freedom has its demented side and that the end of communism might unleash new terrors of its own. Are those pictures pure reporting, or are they artifice? And is this the right line of inquiry? Perhaps instead of worrying about where Avedon falls on the continuum between death and Dovima, we should recognize that his pictures are distillations from a world where mortality and freedom -- and style -- are all permanent problems. Even this show will not settle all the questions of Avedon's intentions and achievements. But it should convince us to pose those questions differently.