Swank in The Arts; 154; Richard Avedon - show at DMFA

This is only the beginning. Okay, you ready? Hey you in the crowd. And what a happy face you are. Ain't you never, never been here before. For nearly a full generation, the name of Richard Avedon has translated to fashion shock. The excitement that has left us from the gleaming pages of the world's exclusive fashion publications has been his excitement, transmitted to the places he works and to his models. They seem to infect the garments they wear with the same tension

so that an Avedon fashion photograph is one big electric circuit. The wonder is that he stayed in fashion photography as long as he did, except that he did it so superbly and kept finding new directions to go with any. The huge retrospective showing of his work titled Avedon, Photographs 1947 to 77, made clear that while Avedon's earlier label might read fashion, he was creating all the time the same kinds of explosions in his field that others were making in theirs, in dance, in theater, music, and other areas of the visual arts. The exhibition also established that some good while ago Avedon had moved far beyond the limitations of fashion photography as such, expanding and intensifying his gifts. The photographs document the change, reflect the joy, the bitterness, the fun, the impatience, the curiosity that accompanies it.

That exhibition has opened at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts in an admirable installation by Elizabeth Paul, who also designed this show for the Metropolitan Museum. The photographs are at the Museum of Fine Arts. Richard Avedon is here. Richard, what was it out of your experience that took you and your camera into fashion? My father, who started his life out as a schoolteacher, went into business and owned a department, a woman's specialty shop. It was called Avedon's Fifth Avenue. And they had all the fashion magazines in the house of vanity fair and vogue and Harper's Bazaar at the high period in the 1930s and 40s when I was a child. And I remember looking at those photographs, I think also the fact that my sister was very, very beautiful. Her beauty was the event of her life and the event of the family. And I started photographing her as a child,

snapshots, and then imitating the photographs in Harper's Bazaar with her when she was, say, 14 or 15 years old. And I think I eased into an understanding of fashion photography in that way. That's fascinating. Who were the names that you remember? Or did you remember them by name? Or did you remember them by style? The photographers that were working here? Well, I don't think I was too aware of their names. I used to tear out the pictures I liked, and it happened they were by Stichen. And many, and mostly by Martin Moncacci. And he was a Hungarian photographer who went to work in Germany and left at the beginning of Hitler. And was the first photographer to do use action with a small camera.

And that was an enormous influence on me. The idea that there could be free laughing women that didn't look like Greek statues, but look like real women. He also was very interested in big women, broad-shouldered, strong women, running by the sea. He was very exciting to look at his work. And those were the pictures I used to tear up and pin the wall next to my bed. Once you got into this field, what were the restrictions that you had to overcome to work the way you wanted to do that? I was extraordinarily lucky. I came out of the merchant marine at a time when the editors, when there was a sense of a rebirth, a rebirth of French fashion, a rebirth of the war was over. Fashion magazines could now turn their attention back to their original purpose. And there were a great many older photographers, great lions of photography.

And the art directors and editors were a little bit fed up with these stars and wanted to encourage a new and young photographer. So in those days, I think I was the only young photographer. And anything I did, I was taught by three amazing people who were the editors of Harper's Bazaar at that time and encouraged. So I had very little to overcome. That would be... 1945 was my first issue. The three people would have been... Alexei Brotovitch, from the art director, Carmel Snow was the editor, and Diana Rielin was the fashion editor. She later became the editor in Chief of Vogue. Well, which of the three of these was the most influential for you? Well, they were all influential in different ways. Carmel Snow was an instinctive editor. She would... I bring photographs to her desk and she'd say, but there's something in the eyes in this one. She was very humanistic. Diana Rielin was a only interested in the cut of a suit or a coat. And she also spoke in a very strange code.

She free-associated and then would... She'd throw you a ball and you had to run with it. And she never wanted you to come back with what she said but an interpretation of it. So learning that language was... The great... The great teacher of... in my life and of that time and maybe of all time in photography was Alexei Brotovitch. And he taught in a very silent and cryptic way. He was a white Russian who left Russia at the time of the revolution. When to Paris came to New York, brought to New York by Carmel Snow to redesign Harper's Bazaar. And I took... When I left the... When the war was over and I was out of the merchant marine I went to all of his classes. He taught at the new school. He ended up teaching in my studio, actually, because he felt the atmosphere of a studio was better for his students than a classroom. And taking all of his courses,

I took courses in graphic design, in everything to do with the graphic arts, as well as photography. And the assignment in one of these classes was to create a neon sign for Broadway. And after the class was over, I went up to his desk and said Mr. Brotovitch. I always called him Mr. Brotovitch. Even in the last years of working together when he would say, why not to call me Alexey? I would say, well, yes, Alexey. Now, Mr. Brotovitch, I couldn't... That student-teacher relationship never changed. And I said, Mr. Brotovitch, you see, I'm a photographer. And although I'm taking this class, there's no way that I can draw. And I don't know how I can design a neon sign for Times Square. And his head was always down. And then he lifted this great head of his and he said, why not to use spaghetti? And I thought, my God, that is the lesson

I will never be stuck again. If you can't do it one way, you do it another and I got some pipe cleaners and made a neon sign. And it was the key lesson in my life that you have to... you solve problems. You don't stop because you can't. Well, your pictures are often highly complicated, very active. Do you know exactly what you want or do you set the stage and wait for something to happen? You do both. You know what you want in a general way. You know what it is you're trying to achieve. But for example, if I do a photograph of a woman running, I know the attitude I want. And I know one of the dramatic elements in the clothes. Clothes are very often... they're just fortunate gifts to a photographer because they have such form and pattern and line to work with. Then when she starts to run,

one hopes for the happy accident. But within the form and within the discipline. I think the most... For me, interesting part of fashion photography is that it must always look effortless. It's a little like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. They dance and you think you could dance exactly as they do. And it's craft, it's discipline, it's worked out to every decimal of a second. And the same thing applies to fashion photography. The work can't show whether we've let it for hours and rehearsed it for hours. It can never look like that at the end. Well, you've been, of course, moving out of fashion for a long time. Ready? You're a photographer of broad, broad area. What is it that you look for in any face? You still are concerned with people. That's right, isn't it?

Yes, character, quality, a reflection of my concerns at the moment in someone else's face. It's almost as if I'm writing my autobiography with their faces. What do you mean? Just that. That my work is in a sense my autobiography and I write it through other people's faces, through the faces of the people I photograph. In other words, a face at one time might move you to work one way and another face at another. Yes, of course. In a terribly different way. Yeah. It only matters that in some way I relate to them and I feel connected to them and that there is an exchange of energy between myself and the sitter and it's when those two energies meet that the photograph has taken. I just came back from Paris where I photograph Francis Bacon and he's an artist and obviously in a very great one and he came to the sitting and said that he was interested in posing because he liked the way in which I simplified

everything down to the essential and I said then you realize how tricky a sitting like this is because since there are no backgrounds and since it'll just be you against a sheet of white paper it could indeed be a passport picture and the only thing we have to work with is this tension that I didn't have to say anymore. He turned into the camera and he gave me what is not really a performance because it was Bacon but he knew what I needed and gave it to me. I had hardly to work. That's very rare. Is that conscious happening on unconscious? On his part it was conscious but usually of course it's unconscious. It's a quality that the sitter has without no being aware of it. What do you as a photographer have to do to get that to happen? It's like a conversation. You adjust your conversation if you're speaking to a child

you speak in one vocabulary. If you speak to the bank teller and in order to negotiate alone you speak in another vocabulary. If you speak to your parents you speak in a different language or your teachers. I think a photographic sitting is a little like that. You adjust. You shift. It's probably exactly like what you have to do when you do an interview. It's like being an athlete isn't it, Patsy? You're here with me. We have these few minutes. You don't know what's going to come out of my mouth. You have to be right there. You have to shift it, control it. Bring me forward or if you see me slipping away. Bring me back or if you want me to slip away if that's the quality that you think is interesting. Let me go. It's exactly like what you do. Was there ever Tom when your work was the most satisfying to you? Well, it's next year's work. I think I don't live much in the past. At all, really. I find this exhibition.

It's almost as if I'm editing the work of another photographer. And I hardly live in the present. And I live a great deal in the future. Future photographs, future plans. Well, you always worked in many areas at the same time. And in the 60s, you spent a good deal of time in Vietnam. But you never released, as far as I know, but one of those pictures. Why not? Well, I had never done war photography. And in a funny way, we know about war, unless we've experienced it directly. Only what we have assimilated through other artists, photographers, movies. I had never photographed a war. And I went there in a funny way, almost like a Hollywood movie, or like David Duncan or Kappa. It took me a long while to refine

and develop my own subjectivity. I did a great many pictures of napalm victims, of victims of the war. And I felt, on returning to New York and looking at them, there was something almost pornographic. Disgusting about the idea of a beautiful photograph, of a terrible and tragic thing. It seemed to me to be the dead opposite of what the photograph was supposed to accomplish. It's as if I was adding to the sum of violence in the world, instead of going against it. I think that these pictures of burnt people, the terrible things we see on television, every night, serve and satisfy something unconscious, voyeuristic and ugly. I haven't resolved that. I don't quite understand it,

but I certainly won't show those photographs until that's clear in my mind. Well, that sounds as if you had always known when you were changing or when you were going to change. Well, I guess I was thinking, perhaps more simplistically in terms of not working in fashion field. The pictures you took in Vietnam, the pictures of the politicians, the movement out of one area of identification. Does that come at a specific time as a result of something or is that simply an element of growth? It's an element of growth. For example, in order to prepare the exhibition, I worked loosely for seven years and intensely for two. I had to reprint every single click in this finger, re-edit and find the pictures that had been lost and not been chosen in earlier years. Then in the last two years, edit the book, supervise the engraving and make the prints and design and create the show.

So I couldn't possibly have taken on in the last two years anything new. The moment the show opened at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, I thought, now what? Am I going to do with my time? And that's when this new assignment, this new project, came up. I couldn't have done it two years now. I'm ready for it. So it has something to do with the practicality of time. You're speaking of the commission from the late Mitchell Wilder? Yes. Avidon West. Yeah. Well, tell me about that. That seems to be absolutely as far from Oat Couture as you could possibly get. Well, as a fashion, it is, of course, very far. As a fashion photographer, as a photographer, I've been a fashion photographer. I've also been a portrait photographer simultaneously, in tandem since the first, in the late 1940s. Yeah. And this exhibition gives you a feeling that I'm a fashion photographer. If you've seen a previous one, you would see the portrait work. In any case, Mitchell Wilder, who's with the aim,

who died recently, tragically. Yes. It was with the aim and caught a museum in Fort Worth. And after this exhibition opened, he called and asked if I would be interested in photographing in the West. What he didn't know was that I had started that project on my own. I've spent many years in Montana, in the Madison Valley, at River Valley, and I had begun photographing my friends in NS Montana. And felt that this was a new quality of a person for me to photograph. They had a lot to learn about people of the West. I felt that the West, in a way, is a country within this country and a very powerful one and a very mysterious one to an Easterner. So whereas people of accomplishment are what I have photographed for 30 years, they're obviously less interesting to me.

Now than they were when I was much younger. So I met with Wilder and Bob Wilson and other people at the museum. And we began to perceive the project and to develop it. And I will now spend the next five years working in the West, possibly in 10 towns. So that I can return, no, I'm just beginning the research now. So that I'll return to those 10 towns for five years. So that I, the change of seasons, the change in people, change in the quality of the towns, and concerns. And then, in the end of the fifth year or sixth year, this work will be, which is my next body, if work will be at the Amon Carter Museum. I think it's definite. I don't know if I'm... How much time do you anticipate that will take out of the five years? I can't tell. I have a studio and a staff that I have to keep functioning.

And I have to do a certain amount of commercial work to keep that going. So I'll just, you know, I have a sense the time is getting shorter for me. And I'd like to take as much of it for my, what I feel is my more interesting work, deeper work, as I can get. Probably half the year. Is that enough to satisfy you? Will you need, in addition to that, some other project? Do you require to do a lot of things at one time? No, well, no. For practical reasons, I will have to do other things. But other than that, the project like this is so overwhelming and exciting. It's so in the tradition of the great Western photographer, the great photographers like Curtis and Brady, to go and to do portraits in the West. It has a great tradition behind me and it's an enormous challenge. It's also changing so enormously quickly now.

Well, that's part of it. I want to record these faces before they are changed. Before automation takes over and mining is no longer what it is and ranching is no longer what it is. I want that, I want to put those faces on film. You see that as a documentation, rather than an interpretation. No, interpretation. It has to be very subjective. Although it seems to have the structure of a documentation. Reality doesn't really exist in a photograph. If I photograph you as I see you right now, that's not the picture that would be taken from an inch away or a moment later. And yet it implies something about you. For example, one of the things that concerns me or interests me is the whole nature of masculinity in the West. Western men are very different from men in the East. They all have guns.

We don't all have guns and they know how to use them. I don't know about that. I want to learn about it. And I might photograph, as I did in Sweetwater, at the rattlesnake roundup of 11 or 14-year-old boy holding a beheaded rattlesnake in a blood-covered shirt with a face of a dura angel and the contradictions and the metaphor in that has a great deal to do with Mike Interest in defining the difference between Western men and other men in the country. So that's very far from doing a picture of a cowboy that looks like a Marlboro man. So that's how we work. It's the use of imagination and hopefully a little intelligence. Can you sum up for me what it is that you want the camera to do for you?

I think the exhibition and my book sum that up. Just continuing is my language. Thank you. Thank you. The exhibition of Avidon photographs, which opened today at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, will continue through June the 24th. Meantime, the art is alive and well at the hands of its local practitioners, dealers, and aficionados. The Aiman Carter Museum and Fort Worth is right now showing 20th century photographs from its permanent collection. After image, Ben Breard's gallery in the quadrangle closes the current show of the work of Harry Callahan this Saturday. But then will exhibit the surreal color photography of Michael Cede to be seen through June the 16th. The Central Business District Association and the Dallas Downtown News are sponsoring a photography contest with Downtown Dallas its people and its look as the subject. Entries are to be submitted up until June the 30th

and the top 50 entries will be displayed in August in the Great Hall of the Dallas City Hall afterwards in other downtown locations. On Friday, the Allen Street Gallery, the home of the Center for Visual Communications, will open its Texas Women's Photography Show, organized to draw attention to the quality and variety of work done by female photographers living in the state. The exhibition drew 72 entries from 29 entrants and was judged by Linda Conner of San Francisco. The three purchase prizes of $300 each will be announced at the opening festivities this Friday evening at the gallery. Dan Parr has arranged a brief preview of this exhibition for you to look at as we say goodnight. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.

Thank you.