Richard Avedon

Richard Avedon photographed fashion as if the clothes were being worn by people in a hurry, and portraits as if the sitter had nowhere to hide. He grew up in New York, his father ran a clothing store, and he learned the trade photographing merchant seamen for identification cards in the war. Alexey Brodovitch took him into the Design Laboratory and then onto Harper's Bazaar at twenty-two, and what he did there broke the convention of the period: models running, jumping, laughing, caught in motion on Paris streets rather than posed under studio lights. Dovima with Elephants in 1955 is the emblem of it. The other half of the work is the opposite - portraits against plain white seamless paper, large format, no props and no shadow, printed big: Eisenhower, Marilyn Monroe exhausted after the shoot was over, his own father dying, and In the American West, five years photographing drifters, miners and slaughterhouse workers, which was attacked for making its subjects look wretched and is now regarded as his major work. He was the first staff photographer the New Yorker ever had. He collapsed on assignment in Texas in 2004 and died a few days later, aged eighty-one, still working. He designed the look of the film Funny Face, in which Fred Astaire plays a photographer based on him. His portrait of his dying father was made over several visits with his father s agreement. The Avedon Foundation now holds the archive. In the American West was commissioned by a museum in Texas and took five summers.

• Lived: 1923 CE – 2004 CE
• Nationality: American
• Roles: artist