Richard Avedon: Fashion’s Greatest Photographer
A provocative approach to portraiture brought raw emotion and movement to the pages of Harper’s Bazaar, and changed fashion photography for ever.
In 1944, a twenty-one-year-old Richard Avedon talked his way into a job as a photographer at Harper’s Bazaar. When he left, two decades later, he had changed fashion photography forever and established himself as one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century. Up to this point fashion photography was a largely static, studio-bound affair, dominated by classically inspired masters like Cecil Beaton. Elegant models were treated like objects d’art, meticulously posed, exquisitely lit using multiple lights, and photographed using large format cameras.
Avedon swept all of this aside, establishing himself in the vanguard of a new generation of young post-war photographers who created a world where models ran through Paris streets, balanced on roller skates, flirted with elephants, danced in cafés and occupied a world that felt spontaneous rather than staged. This kind of fashion imagery is so familiar to us today that it is easy to forget that somebody had to invent it.
Click to enlarge | All images credit: Richard Avedon / The Richard Avedon Foundation
When Avedon moved to Vogue two decades on in 1966, he carried his fashion aesthetic into a broader arena, becoming one of the defining portraitists of post-war America. But it’s these first defining 20 years of his career at Harpers that have been brought together for the first time in Richard Avedon: The Harper’s Bazaar Years, a lavish book which showcases the iconic and lesser-known photographs that defined the magazine’s most groundbreaking period, when, as Avedon later reflected, “nobody could believe such a magazine existed.”
“Richard was an intense and charismatic man, completely absorbed in photography,” says Jean Shrimpton, who was one of his favourite subjects. “I always enjoyed working with him and remember his focus and dedication very clearly.” The British supermodel, now 83, remembers the theatre of it all: the narratives, the beauty, the travel, and the big teams who worked with them behind the scenes on editorial shoots at Harper’s Bazaar, and at American Vogue, where she posed for Avedon again when he left Bazaar at the end of 1965. It’s the stuff that crews today can only imagine. They had the time, budget and respect to treat fashion photography as an art form.
Richard Avedon: The Harpers Bazaar Years is being promoted as an essential purchase for fashion lovers, book collectors, and anyone captivated by the work of a master innovator whose pictures still feel fresh and alive nearly eighty years after they were made.
