This was the email I received this morning from a remarkable women’s wear designer I’m friends with:

Ahhh, well, since you asked.

It’s funny you ask, b/c the author Haven Kimmel and I recently had a e-mail conversation that touched on, amongst many things, Avedon, specifically his portrait of Ezra Pound.

Avedon was a great photographer who “got it,” who worked day in and out, and who was able to doing something authentic.  I suppose one could offer that any sort of originality is genius in a way, which I wouldn’t necessarily debate, but I see that great thing in a body of work as more as a confluence of part man and part fate/histories momentum part…you get the idea; I see it was something much more complex than one’s inspirations and capabilities.  Regardless, I’ll leave that up to you, not the point anyway, but the key is Avedon did something original in his career, singular and completely authentic.  Yes, he was inspired by Sander and others, and some argue by his own history as a military photographer, but still he came to his own conclusion.  In the spirit of Ginsberg speaking to Whitman beyond the grave, you could say Sander fell the tree and Avedon carved it. At his apogee, and I believe Avedon’s crowning moment ,his pique his quintessence, was the American West series, he made one of the great photographic moves, and it stands as such still.  Something people will mimic and mimic but something that there will only ever be one of.  He did it first and did it best.

Foremost, and he said it more eloquently if you dig in his essays and quotes, Avedon’s pictures are certainly about himself, or about his idea.  Idea, I think, is the key term here, since it’s what Avedon reduced things too: a philosophy.  He along with the rest of his generation was influenced a great deal by Beckett and the sensibilities and ideas of Existentialism from that generation, that white void that Molloy limps through became Avedon’s white seamless.  Yet, don’t let the starkness of this mislead you; I do believe Avedon was an optimistic, a humanist, b/c when I look at the American West series, I see royalty.  Just like Arbus made the freaks into kings and queens, Avedon made the common people something that transcended.  Avedon would have had Louis Vuitton luggage and been wearing loafers suited for the UWS while shooting that work, and his time with the subject was, I’d gather, fleeting – it was not his world at all and he didn’t pretend it to be -  but all the same he was human and they were human and I see in his work a general love for that ubiquitous suffering and struggle that affronts us all despite our best efforts, that “nakedness of man faced with the absurd” to go to Camus.

On top of this, more generally to discuss his commercial and editorial (non-fine-art) work, he was technically outstanding, not tricky or fancy or conceptual, but more like the Rolls Royce of technique, beautiful and classic and smart.  Using things as simple as notan, to reference Mr. Cardwell, to draw you in and control composition and rythm.  And in the portraits he did editorially he knew the balance between that aesthetic in technique and balancing that with a ruthless display and adjustmentoft the sitters persona (in the Jungian sense).  I imagine Avedon was kind, liked and very smart, but I also suspect that when he photographed his great portraits he was at war with his sitters, b/c the moments seem both terrifying and sublime…which is, as Haven had pointed out to me, the same thing according to Kant.

Finally, it’d be a mistake to underestimate the commerce involved with the photography, and Avedon knew it.  Luckily for Avedon, the look he explored personally also turned out to be very very effective and easy to translate to the commercial realm.  Or maybe it was the other way around.  Either way, it’s a rarity as far as I’ve seen.

Anyway…I’m rambling.  I admire his work obviously.  I don’t deify him or think he didn’t take mediocre photos too.  And there’s a lot he didn’t do.  But what he did do right, he did tremendously.

Hope that helps.

xo

photo: from Avedon at Work in the American West. ©Laura Wilson.

And I wasn’t joking about the loafers, probably ferragamos, and the vintage Louis Vuitton Luggage (↓) either.

photo: from Avedon at Work in the American West. ©Laura Wilson.

Damn fancy, Dick!

Vuitton could inspire a campaign around that photo.