"Listening to Avedon"

Of all Avedon's recent testimonials, none is more concise or revealing as a short cassette tape audio tour of his 1994-95 retrospective "Evidence" made for the show's last tour stop, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA). Culled from interviews with radio journalist and independent producer Connie Goldman conducted over a 25-year period beginning in 1970, the audio tour of "Evidence" gets down to business early. After spending a few minutes discussing his early stab at reportage, Avedon tackles what he has called his "serious work," the portraits. For the rest of the tape, from his Vogue portrait work through the fieldsets from In the American West (1985) and the photographs of his dying father, he boils the issues of photography down to issues of portraiture in which the politics of the image are writ into the direct experience of one-on-one relationships.

Avedon discusses photographic truth, authorship and meaning not so much as parts of a theoretical discussion but as parts of himself discovered through the process of photographing others. That's why for Avedon resolving these issues means more than winning a debate; resolution provides him a measure of individuality and the wholeness of an artistic identity. What the MIA tape makes clear is how complex and confusing individuality and identity can be for someone who tries to find them from behind a camera.





One of the earliest quotes on the audio tour maps out the difficulties Avedon will struggle with for the entire tape. After revealing that "I still use the first camera I ever had, a Rolliflex," Avedon goes on to say that new technology doesn't interest him: what does is "the person in front of me and the moment we share." Although he has since used other cameras (notably an 8x10 view camera), going on record for using the same camera he started with is code for "I'm still the same Avedon, I've never changed. I have integrity as a person and a photographer." On the other hand, describing the photographic act as a moment shared with another person adds a constantly changing cast of creative partners who bring their own individuality to the built-in integrity of Avedon's single-camera identity. The result is his challenging of the fine line between creative integrity and social interaction by insisting on having it both ways. He sees no contradiction in claiming his artistic integrity while admitting that everything he has accomplished as a creative artist depends on the participation of others.

Demanding that he be seen as an artist is nothing new for Avedon; he has spent decades fighting the label "fashion photographer." This is partly because it is important for him to claim his own identity as a photographic artist as opposed to a constantly compromised and therefore non-existent individual associated with "commercial work." In the MIA tape, Avedon bases his claim to being an artist on his "subjectivity," the notion that when we look at an Avedon photograph, whether of Dovima or Marian Anderson, we are also looking at the photographer. "I don't think that I've captured the essence of anyone that I've photographed," Avedon says. "I think I've photographed what I'm feeling myself and recognize in someone else." Like many photographers of his generation (Minor White and Robert Frank come to mind), he believes that describing one's own feelings is the goal of every serious photographer. Finding such feelings is less about self examination than about discovering them through a photographic interaction with the world and its subjects. "A portrait photographer," Avedon says, "depends on another person to complete his picture - the subject imagined - which in a sense is me." Based on the unpredictable complexity of photographic interaction, his idea of subjectivity is a complex social metaphor in which his self is inextricably intertwined with the self of his subjects and theirs with him. His 1993 publication, Autobiography, illustrates the situation perfectly: although the title suggests the story of his life, the book is filled with pictures of other people, as if he can only describe himself through his descriptions of other people...

Reszta artukułu dostępna jest na stronach serwisu "americansuburbx" (Listening to Avedon, 1995, Vince Leo):
http://www.americansuburbx.com/2009/02/theory-listening-to-avedon.html

Zapraszamy do przejrzenia albumów Richarda Avedona dostępnych w naszej ofercie:
http://www.bookoff.pl/search.php?text=richard+avedon