SATURDAY RUBRICS: 5/24/25

SHIRLEY, YOU JEST ... SURELY, YOU GESTURE ... RICHARD AVEDON AND THE FATHERING OF FAME

STARS IN BLACK TURTLENECKS

The above portrait of Richard Avedon taken in front of a portrait he had photographed of his father was itself taken by Gideon Lewin who was Avedon’s assistant for sixteen years. “Towards the end of Avedon’s father’s life, Avedon decided to make peace with him,” Lewin told Interview magazine in 2019 to mark the publication of his monograph, Avedon: Behind the Scenes 1964-1980. “They had a very complicated relationship. So as his father was dying of cancer, he decided he wanted to capture his dying father. That’s what we’re looking at here. It became an exhibition at MoMA. It was my idea to photograph him. His father was dead already, so I couldn’t do them together. I said, 'Let me photograph you in front of your photograph of your father,’ and he said, ‘Brilliant.’ We spent two days photographing. They never really made peace. It’s interesting, his eyes were almost like Picasso. Penetrating.”

Avedon once recalled:

“In 1970, I showed my father for the first time one of the portraits that I had made of him in the years just before. He was wounded. My sense of what is beautiful was very different from his. I wrote to him to try and explain.”

This is the letter:

Dear Dad,

I’m putting this in a letter because phone calls have a way of disappearing in the whatever it is. I’m trying to put into words what I feel most deeply, not just about you, but about my work and the years of undefinable father and son between us. I’ve never understood why I’ve saved the best that’s in me for strangers like Stravinsky and not for my own father.

There was a picture of you on the piano that I saw every day when I was growing up. It was by the Bachrach studio and heavily retouched and we all used to call it “Smilin’ Jack Avedon”—it was a family joke, because it was a photograph of a man we never saw, and of a man I never knew. Years later, Bachrach did an advertisement with me—Richard Avedon, Photographer—as a subject. Their photograph of me was the same as the photograph of you. We were up on the same piano, where neither of us had ever lived.

I am trying to do something else. When you pose for a photograph, it’s behind a smile that isn’t yours. You are angry and hungry and alive. What I value in you is that intensity. I want to make portraits as intense as people. I want your intensity to pass into me, go through the camera and become a recognition to a stranger. I love your ambition and your capacity for disappointment, and that’s still as alive in you as it has ever been.

Do you remember you tried to show me how to ride a bicycle, when I was nine years old? You had come up to New Hampshire for the weekend, I think, in the summer when we were there on vacation, and you were wearing your business suit. You were showing me how to ride a bike, and you fell and I saw your face then. I remember the expression on your face when you fell. I had my box Brownie with me, and I took the picture.

I’m not making myself clear. Do you understand?

Love, Dick

That Bachrach ad:

Avedon in retrospect, introspective:

"It later occurred me, years later, that photographing him was an act of hostility. Shooting, killing him with my camera, watching him die with my camera... could it possibly be that I was telling myself that it was about love and connection, and it was really a kind of murder?"

That 1974 MoMA show of his father got a snarky, dismissive - even downright mean - review in The New York Times written by Gene Thornton. Avedon was in the hospital at the time suffering from an inflammation of the heart. He read the nasty review lying in his hospital bed but got up to set the newspaper on fire and then flushed it down the toilet.

An inflammation of the heart could have been a description as well of how his father made him feel. His work has the urgent formality of a fire retardant that can’t control the wildness where there once were woods but honors the need for it by respecting the roar that can’t be silenced, until it was. All photographs are silent. Avedon’s remain deafeningly so.

Some photos of the exhibit:

Another by Lewin:

And a “selfie” that Avedon took in 1969 with his son, John, and his father, Jacob, down in Sarasota, Florida, where his father lived:

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