Mentor - Richard Avedon

For this photography assignment I chose the famous artist, Richard Avedon. He was born on May 15, 1923 and died on october 1st, 2004. He was an american photographer, people said his sense of fashion and portrait photographs helped define Americas image of beauty, style and culture. 

Richard was born in New York City. After attending the university of columbia he became a photographer for the merchant marines, taking the crewman’s identification photos, which started his life as a photographer. He then began working as an advertising photographer for a department store, but then was quickly discovered by Alexey Brodovitch, the director for the fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar. His career was also promoted by Lillian Bassman at Harpers magazine. After working at a magazine, starting his career for the marine crew and working at the department store he then decided to make his own studio and began providing images for magazine, such as Vogue and Life. He was then offer the job of chief photographer at Harper’s Bazaar. He moved to different positions as he got his career started and became more well known to the public for his work. He never conformed the standard techniques most fashion photographers used of having their models stand emotionless and seemingly indifferent to the camera. Instead he made the models show emotion, smiling, laughing and used many action scenes. During his career in the 1950 he got tired of daylight photography and open air locations he then started the trend of studio lighting using strobe lights.

In 1966 he left his career at Harper’s Bazaar and moved to become a photographer with  Diana Veerland. He later proceeded to become the lead photographer at vogue and photographed the most covers from 1973. In an addition to continuing his fashion career he then began to take photographs of mental patients, civil rights movements and the Vietnam war and the Berlin wall. At the same time he also took photographs of famous artists such as the Beatles. Which then later expanded to more rock and roll artists of the time. Richard was always interested in how to capture the subjects personality and soul in his work, instead of something posed. He became widely known for his work and his change in photography and brought in many famous faces to his studio and photographed many photos. His work is very easily known as his subject looking right at the camera, posed in front and a sheer white background. Richard would evoke reactions from his subjects by putting them in awkward and uncomfortable areas and discussions. Using these methods he would produce images revealing aspects of his subjects character and personality that were usually never shown to the public. 

Richard Avedon’s started his career as a student just taking simple identification cards for the men and working in a department store to becoming a well known photographer at magazine and then working with famous artists. I chose Richard because he was different then every other photographer he took the rules of photography and bent them to suit his idea and his meanings of what should really be captured. He took a simple photo and added character and a humans true beauty and personality to it. Not many have the courage to do what they want but he did.