Avedon, Richard

Avedon, Richard (1923-2004), American fashion and portrait photographer, whose elegant, innovative fashion work brought him international renown, as did his sharply focused, bluntly realistic portrait photographs of presidents, writers, and celebrities. Born in New York, Avedon was trained as a photographer in the United States Merchant Marine in World War II. He began his career in fashion photography in 1945 with Harper's Bazaar, switching to Vogue magazine in 1966, where he spent 24 years. Such a success was his fashion photography that he was responsible for boosting the careers of some models. The film Funny Face (1957) had as its central character a photographer called Dick Avery who discovers and launches a famous model. The character of Avery was based on Avedon.

In his photography Avedon concentrated on the person and became a respected portraitist. He generally photographed people without any props and often with just a white background, relying on capturing a telling facial expression. His subjects were not always presented in a good light—he preferred his photographs to be honest. Retrospective exhibitions of his work were mounted in 1978 at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in 1995 at London's National Portrait Gallery. In 1993 he published a collection of his photographs entitled An Autobiography.