Richard Avedon said of his photography: “A photographic portrait is a picture of someone who knows he’s being photographed and what he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as what he’s wearing or how he looks.”
Born in New York on 15 May 1923., Richard Avedon was in possession of a Kodak Box Brownie camera by the age of 12
Having studied philosophy at Columbia University in the late Thirties, Avedon went on to study photography under Alexey Brodovitch at the Design Laboratory of the New School of Social Research.
Richard Avedon shot the Paris collections for almost 40 years, and was staff photographer for Vogue from 1966. until 1990.
Richard Avedon became the first ever staff photographer for The New Yorker in 1992., at the age of 69.
From the start of his career, Richard Avedon’s name became synonymous with fashion as well as portraiture. He photographed everyone from Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton to Marilyn Monroe, Dorothy Parker and the Duchess of Windsor as well as a lot of “unknown” people. Known for bringing the fashion models of the day, including Suzy Parker and Sunny Harnett, to life, Richard Avedon injected a previously unseen vibrancy into the medium of fashion photography.
Richard Avedon married twice and has a son. Perhaps the most poignant set of photographs Avedon ever produced were those of his dying father. He died in 2004. of a brain haemorrage.
