“Avedon,” Ron Howard’s documentary about the legendary photographer, is a fantastic movie. It’s the best documentary Ron Howard has made (my favorite before this: “The Beatles: Eight Days a Week”), and it’s been edited in a way that’s so supple and artful that its technique should be studied in filmmaking classes. (The film’s editor is Andrew Morreale.) Woven through the movie are hundreds of photographs that were shot by Richard Avedon, and there’s no question that the images are stunning, but the way the movie layers them into your consciousness is nearly musical in its finesse. And that helps to tell the very large story “Avedon” is telling: how Richard Avedon changed the metaphysics of photography, shifting the way we see the world.
There’s a paradox running down the center of Avedon’s work that feels as epic and tingly as the 20th century, and that is this: He was a paragon of high fashion — the world of glamour and impossible beauty — but he was also, as a maker of images, the ultimate democratic humanist. The beauty of “Avedon” is that it explains that paradox and makes those images sing. Howard interpolates old clips and interviews, placing Avedon, with his sleek command, at the center of the movie. He also talks to models and critics and media and art-world luminaries who have a great deal of import to say. They include Tina Brown, Larry Gagosian, John Lahr, Twiggy, Adam Gopnik, Hilton Als, Calvin Klein, and Avedon’s lovingly insightful son, John Avedon. James Martin, the executive director of the Richard Avedon Foundation, takes us deep into the labyrinth of Avedon’s archives, where we see the work that resulted from the 16,000 sittings he did from 1944 until his death in 2004. That’s a long time, but it still averages out to one sitting per day, Monday through Friday, for 60 years. The movie also tells the tragic story of his mentally ill sister, whom he revered, and traces his troubled marriages.
“Avedon” opens with an old clip of Richard Avedon, fixing that piercing bird-eye look of his into the camera as he explains, “I can say very little about photography. I follow no rules, no laws, and no advice.” He’s totally serious about that. We then get a montage, set to the funky martial beat of Spoon’s “I Turn My Camera On,” of Avedon portraits of the famous. John Lennon. Orson Welles. Michael Jordan. Elizabeth Taylor. Groucho Marx. Twiggy (in mid-air). Anjelica Huston. Marilyn Monroe lovingly embracing Arthur Miller. Truman Capote. J. Robert Oppenheimer.
All the images look timeless. (Avedon’s lighting makes it look as if each one was taken yesterday.) Every subject looks like what we imagine them looking like, and also different from how you’ve ever seen them. More direct and unfiltered, more intimately themselves. That’s the Avedon touch, but the magic element is that we can’t see how he achieved it. The technique is invisible. There’s a part of one that thinks, “Okay, just set up a camera and put some black-and-white film in it. Place a famous person in front of it. Encourage them to relax and ‘be themselves.’ And voilà! I could be Richard Avedon.”
He probably would have said you’re not wrong.
He wasn’t very interested in the technique of photography. Talk to him about f-stops and he would glaze over. His technique was in the way he approached a session. In the film, Isabella Rossellini says that other photographers tend to shoot and shoot and shoot, but Avedon would shoot an image every so often, then tell you to think of something, then shoot again, and end up with a total of maybe 10 shots. He himself explains that if you’ve booked someone for an hour, you don’t have to shoot for an hour. He says that he wastes half an hour having coffee, and then, maybe five minutes before the hour is over, he and the subject will go over to the white paper background, and the magic happens.
The white paper! It has its source in a remarkable story. Avedon was born in New York in 1923, and when he was a kid he says that walking down a street he would blink for a moment and keep his eyes closed, to keep what he saw alive in his head. It was his way of taking pictures before he’d even gotten a camera. He entered the U.S. Merchant Marines when he was 19, securing a place in the photographic department, where he took maybe 100,000 portraits of enlisted men and other workers, all to use for ID cards.
This was the photographer’s equivalent of peeling potatoes on KP duty. But Avedon began to notice something. Shooting these military mug shots against a white background, he encountered “thousands of baffled faces looking into the camera,” and he saw how the photographs revealed these people. That’s one of the startling things about police mug shots. (John Waters: “Everybody looks better under arrest.”) We see a handful of the ID photos that Avedon took, and there it is: the Avedon style. He saw that each face was different, and needed nothing else to be different. So he took what fate handed him — a thankless military assignment — and turned it into a vision. The white background equalized everything. It became his way of making each individual stand out as an individual, with literally nothing to get in the way.
He became a head-on existential classicist, one who echoed Diane Arbus’s eye for highlighting the aspect of a person that was somehow off. The famous Avedon shot of the model Lauren Hutton with her head thrown back and her breast popping out looks as perfectly composed as a Picasso sculpture. But it was totally spontaneous; it just happened. And that’s true of all the famous and iconic gazes Avedon’s portrait subjects gave him. Those looks weren’t planned (how could they have been?).
At the tail-end of a session in 1953, Charlie Chaplin pranked the camera by holding devil horns over his grinning face, and that became one of the most famous images Avedon ever shot. Images like that happened…and then became frozen in the hive mind’s eye. But as “Avedon” explains, part of what he was always recording was the ineffable dance between subject and artist, using each subject to express something that there was there in himself. (Chaplin wouldn’t have made those devil horns for anyone else.)
By the time of the 1957 Hollywood musical “Funny Face,” which paired Audrey Hepburn with Fred Astaire as a magazine photographer pointedly based on Avedon, he was already becoming a legend, and he began to use his power as part of his method as an artist. In his 1957 shoot with Marilyn Monroe, pegged to “The Prince and the Showgirl,” the trick was: How could you photograph Marilyn — or, rather, how could you photograph her the way Avedon wanted to photograph her — when she had come prepared, more than anyone else alive, to be photographed? The shoot took an entire day, and it’s full of joyous photographs of Marilyn in full splendor, but the iconic shot that emerged from it was taken at the end of the day, when she let down her guard for 10 seconds, and kind of drooped, and looked a bit sad, and we glimpse, in that photograph, the real Marilyn — not necessarily the forlorn Marilyn, but the full woman behind the image. You see Norma Jean grown up.
“Avedon” is full of great stories and privileged glimpses into how Avedon created some of his most famous images. And, of course, he also photographed the unfamous, like the Oklahoma oil workers he shot in 1980. He used his impish nature to coax fashion models into leaping through the air for his models-in-motion photographs. He waited around for seven weeks in Vietnam to photograph the war’s American generals, and devised singular ways to shoot the Chicago 7 and the denizens of the Warhol Factory and the residents of the new American West, in a series that was so raw and authentic no museum in New York wanted anything to do with it. (He was that far ahead of the curve.) We also hear the story of how he photographed his aging father and used that process to reconcile with him. Avedon supported his own ritzy lifestyle by doing advertising work (including the Obsession perfume TV spots that were like surrealist mini-films), but for him it was never a compromise. And we see how that could be the case. There is, over 60 years, a breathtaking continuity between his portrait work and his fashion work and his commercial work that makes it all inseparable. That’s because every photograph Richard Avedon ever took was striving for the same thing: to open your eyes.
