Legends deserve better biographies than this, which reads like a long, repetitive mash note. I mean, really, did we need two telling references to the size of Rudolf Nureyev's "member" in a book that can't even manage to find one man the closeted photographer actually may have bedded?
Still, Avedon is an inherently fascinating, if self-aggrandizing character who got to click nearly every accomplished person of the 20th century but who staked his claim to posterity early in his career as the loyal subject of two fashion dictators, Carmel Snow and Diana Vreeland. Gefter dishes a lot of hooey about the "Avedon woman," (Dovima, Lauren Hutton & Stephanie Seymour, among them) and endlessly focuses on Avedon's snobbish need to be perceived as the kind of groundbreaking artist he revered (Proust) while still making tons of money, loving show tunes and living an expense-account life in which all his suffering was internal. He also quotes numerous contemporary media critics and occasional curators at length, unconvincingly, to bolster Avedon's significance over the long haul while never fully addressing his middle-brow appeal. People, including me, DID flock to his shows perhaps for the same reason we once bought magazines: to see famous people, close-up.
Throughout the book, I kept Googling Avedon's photos and discovered that the internet really does the photographer no favors. To bring Gefter's obsession full circle, size really DOES matter as well as quantity. None of the digital images has remotely the impact of walking into a museum or gallery and seeing Andy Warhol's Factory crowd looming 7 feet high, NUDE, or even flipping through the pages of Rolling Stone or The New Yorker and being wowed by the sheer number of fascinating subjects who sat for the frenetic silver fox.
Buy a coffee table book instead.
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