American fashion and portrait photographer, whose elegant, innovative fashion work soon brought him international renown, as did his sharply focused, bluntly realistic portrait photographs of presidents, writers, and celebrities. Born in New York City, Avedon was trained as a photographer in the United States Merchant Marine in World War II. He began his career in fashion photography in 1945 with Harper's Bazaar, switching to Vogue magazine in 1966. Mr. Avedon's photographs captured the freedom, excitement and energy of fashion as it entered an era of transformation and popularization. No matter what the prevailing style, his camera eye always found a way to dramatize its spirit as the fashion world's creative attention swayed variously from the "New Look" of liberated Paris to pragmatic American sportswear designed in New York, and from the anti-establishment fashion of London's Carnaby Street to sophisticated, tailored dresses and suits from Milan. Although Richard Avedon first earned his reputation as a fashion photographer, his greatest achievement has been his stunning reinvention of the genre of photographic portraiture. His photographs were shown at the Smithsonian Institution in 1962 and in the spring of 1994 in a retrospective exhibition organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art. He also maintained a lucrative sideline creating advertising photographs for clients like Revlon and Christian Dior. " Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me. My concern is...the human predicament; only what I consider the human predicament may simply be my own." --R.A.
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