© Richard Avedon

I never real­ized how much I enjoy Richard Avedon’s work after I revisit my old DVD, Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light. Further read­ing leads me to this exquis­ite fea­ture & com­men­tary by cura­tors Carol Squiers and Vince Aletti for the New York Times.

The entire cut is about 6:00 min long, if you’re in a hurry, here are some bits that I found to be awakening.

On feel­ings:

Avedon was always look­ing for another way to show how women thought and how women felt, and that meant it they aren’t nec­es­sar­ily always just feel­ing beau­ti­ful, they might be inse­cure, but they might be also very very happy. Avedon really made the laugh­ing woman a real sub­ject in fashion.

On ‘color’:

There were not sup­posed to be any peo­ple of color in Harper’s Bazaar mag­a­zine, for Avedon, peo­ple of color were part of the spec­trum that were nor­mal nat­ural to him, In his quest for beau­ties — that were not just your aver­age American beauty — he looked at women who were of dif­fer­ent eth­nic back­ground, one of the first ones he came up with was China Machado a woman of Portuguese and Chinese ances­try. He actu­ally had to threaten to quit Harper’s Bazaar in order to get them to use China Machado in the pages of the mag­a­zine. This par­tic­u­lar fight only esca­lated when he decided he wanted to use a black model whose name is Donyale Luna.

On being true to his vision:

Avedon always seem to be slightly ahead of his time in terms of what­ever the social and cul­tural think­ing was of the time. He always seemed to be push­ing push­ing the enve­lope and get­ting him­self into trou­ble but because he was who he was, he could threaten and they would bend to his will.

More about his vision, Vince Aletti added:

I think what he did best was com­press the move­ment that he had on the street, the kind of atti­tude of excite­ment and exu­ber­ance that he cap­tured with mod­els out in the world was able to put that into the stu­dio and cap­ture that for the page. […] Avedon was always very much a per­son of his time, so he was really attuned to the energy and exu­ber­ance of the 60s, and the rad­i­cal­ism that was there as well and wanted to kind of trans­late that into the work as well, if only by encour­ag­ing his mod­els to let go, to really spread across the page, or to really be excited and con­vey that sense of excite­ment out to the world.

What I noticed in the last cou­ple of years is that fash­ion pages on the mag­a­zines today no longer has so much weight in its con­tent — weak con­cepts, repet­i­tive looks and most destruc­tive — albeit the most unap­par­ent — is the per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of the fash­ion, and the objec­ti­fi­ca­tion of the per­son behind it. Feelings & expres­sions are kept at the bare min­i­mum — mak­ing them almost irrel­e­vant at times, and at the same time turn­ing the fash­ion prod­ucts into bib­li­cal objects.

Perhaps this is one of those period in his­tory books where we are at the turn­ing point where con­sumerism is the new world order (or reli­gion, on this mat­ter). One can only hope that this is just — well — fash­ion at its best.