Everybody!

He photographed everybody!  I caught the Richard Avedon 100 retrospective at the Gagosian gallery, marking the centenary of his birth.  He had a front-row seat for fashion, culture, politics and sports for much of the 20th century.  He even went to school with James Baldwin whose image is imposed over his own in this uncharacteristic work.  

Here's the crowd gazing at the photograph that defines him, for better or worse. Really, who ever shot a more memorable photo for a fashion magazine?

Avedon, who obsessed over the quality of his prints, would HATE these reproductions of his photos, filled with reflections, but they aim only to convey the diversity of his subjects. Gagosian had a gaggle of famous folks choose the shots shown in the gallery.  I've omitted their names because the photos really don't need to be anything other than seen.  Avedon lobbied to be known as an artist rather than a fashion photographer.  Involving celebrities in show's selection seems like reinforcing the most superficial aspect of his work.

U.S. Representative Shirley Chisholm, Pioneer 

Bayard Rustin, Gay Civil Rights Strategist

Patti Smith, Grandma Rocker

Michael Jordan, Basketball Player

Ray Masai Hewitt, Jean Genet and Zayd Shakur, Outlaws

Andy Warhol, Shooting Victim

This rather shocking photo tells us everything we need to know about Avedon's sexual orientation, a source of conflict for him.  In the earl 80s, a student at the School of American Ballet told me that Nureyev loved nothing better than to strut around the locker room stark naked, snapping the asses of other dancers he found attractive with towels.  HIV killed him and David on the same day in 1993.

Rudolf Nureyev

W.H. Auden, Poet

Lew Alcindor, Pre-Muslim

Louis Armstrong, Musician & Entertainer

Elizabeth Taylor, Star

The Duke & Duchess of Windsor, Dissolute Royals

J. Robert Oppenheimer, Father of the Atomic Bomb

Brigitte Bardot, Sex Symbol

The eerie juxtaposition of these three photos almost suggests that the author of In Cold Blood is conducting--or manipulating--Avedon's criminal subjects.  Show us your tats, guys. Smith supposedly fell in love with Capote--or was it vice versa?   In any case, just imagine the author watching the execution--in person--of a man whose grisly story pretty much conferred immortality upon him.

Truman Capote, Non-Fiction Novelist

Richard Hickock, Murderer

Perry Edward Smith, Murderer

Audrey Hepburn, Waif

Twiggy, Model

You will never guess!

I think this woman may have been my first brush with a celebrity in the wild.  We rode the same ferry to Super Paradise Beach in Mykonos, the summer after I graduated from college. Her bikini wasn't much bigger than a couple of Band Aids!

Pat Cleveland, Model

As beautiful as she is, color drains the magic from Avedon's work.

Lauren Hutton, Model

Natassaja Kinski, Nymphet

Hillary Clinton, Lightning Rod

Chet Baker, Junkie Musician

Leonard Bernstein, Maestro

Tina Turner, Buddhist

Avedon must have taken this portrait when he was a staff photographer for The New Yorker, surely Tina Brown's most illustrious hire.  He really captures the singer's messiness, a quality that makes her the alt rock Judy Garland.

Chan Marshal aka Cat Power

I saved many of Avedon's magazine portraits even collaging some of my favorites in 2005.

His image of Barbra inspired a t-shirt I made for a screen printing class at FIT in 1995, after Republicans retook the House in the midterm elections.  Yep, I've been an Avedon stan for a long, long time.

Beginning in 1979 over a five-year period, Avedon, with the sponsorship of the then new Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, photographed more than 750 men and women living in the American West.  No doubt striving to achieve the artistic credibility of rival Irving Penn, his effort fell flat with the audience that counted most:  the curator of the Museum of Modern Art's photography department.  Some critics savaged him for voyeurism and exploitation.  They were fucking wrong!  Avedon brought the same intensity to his portraits of ordinary people, the kind who don't live on either coast, as he did celebrities.  Ten of these haunting, over-size portraits are the literal heart of Avedon 100.

Growing up in El Paso, I once caught a rattlesnake about 1/25 the size of this one.  But I was just as proud.

Boyd Fortin, Age 13

Tom Stroud, Oil Field Worker

Avedon pioneered enlarging his photos to mural size, technically no easy feat.

Avedon's composite of Marilyn must have seeped into my consciousness over time.  It recalls pictures I took of Florian in the Pines not long after purchasing a digital camera.  I called them "my Marilyn series." Sometimes a subject's exuberance requires more than a single image. If only I'd stitched them together!

The first time I saw Avedon's iconic group portrait of Andy Warhol's Factory at the Marlborough Gallery in 1975, joining them--something I once wanted to do more than anything in the world--would have been impossible.  I had such a crush on Joe Dallesandro, one of the scene's few survivors.

I found it most heartening that young fashion kidz were checking out the work of an elder. The fellow on the right was wearing a t-shirt that said "Broken Hearts Clinic."  I'll bet Avedon would have gotten them to sit for a portrait.