In Touch With Fragility: Richard Avedon

Richard Avedon is an all time favourite because of the variety and vision, a real master of photography and in the Spotlight here from Faded + Blurred.

“All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.”
– Richard Avedon
Though he is known mostly for his minimalistic portraits; intense and often brooding subjects surrounded by white, it was the world of fashion that provided the backdrop that helped make Richard Avedon one of the most celebrated, controversial and sought after photographers of all time. Fashion photography simply didn’t exist before Richard Avedon, not modern fashion photography at any rate. Before Avedon, fashion photography was static and flat, models were stiffly dressed and rigidly posed. Avedon took fashion out of the studio and into the streets. He injected movement, life and a vitality where none had existed before. If a particular scene he wanted did not exist, Avedon created it, building sets, bringing in models, or, as was often the case, enlisting the help of onlookers or passers by. Avedon was both an ardent observer and a passionate creator, fascinated with what he called “the human quality”. It was this fascination that led him to constantly explore and reinvent what it meant to be a photographer and an artist. For nearly 60 years, from Paris fashion to celebrity portraits to a five year project chronicling the working class people and drifters of the American West, Richard Avedon not only defined generations of photography, but also inspired countless photographers to look to his work to bring life to their own. Irving Penn once said of Avedon “I stand in awe of Avedon. For scope and magnitude, he is the greatest of fashion photographers. He’s a seismograph.”

Born in 1923 in Manhattan, Richard Avedon was just 21 years old when his photographs first appeared in Harper’s Bazaar. He had dropped out of high school and joined the Merchant Marine, where he served as a photographer.”I must have taken pictures of maybe 100,000 baffled faces,” Avedon once said, “before it ever occurred to me that I was becoming a photographer.” Upon returning, he was hired as a photographer for a department store. His work was seen by Alexy Brodovitch, the art director for Harper’s Bazaar, who saw something unique in Avedon’s work. “His first photographs for us were technically very bad”, Brodovitch remembers. “But they were not snapshots. It had always been the shock-surprise element in his work that makes it something special.” Brodovitch would go on to play an enormous role in Avedon’s life and career, serving alternately as mentor, father figure and friend. Avedon soon became chief photographer for the magazine and, by 1946, owned his own studio and was also shooting for Vogue and Life. ….READ MORE

 

Faded + Blurred

I stumbled across this blog and realised it has the same ethos as ours namely it is people who are interested in photography talking about photography

Initially a way for a group of friends to keep track of monthly photo walks, Faded + Blurred has evolved into a fantastic online resource for creative inspiration, shared by a community of photographers, both amateur and professional, who are dedicated to the art and craft of making images. This is what they say about themselves, sounds like us.

Here for example is a brilliant article about Bill Brandt

“It is part of the photographer’s job to see more intensely than most people do. He must have and keep in him something of the receptiveness of the child who looks at the world for the first time or of the traveler who enters a strange country.” – Bill Brandt

Heralded by many as Britain’s greatest modern photographer, Bill Brandt was a man who never took a photograph unless he had something to say. On par with Man Ray, Brassai, and Atget, Brandt accomplished what few photographers have been able to do (either before or since), which is to successfully bridge the gap between photojournalism and documentary photography all the way to the other end of the spectrum of fine art. His work is characterized by stark contrasts between black and white and strong geometrical structures, whether the images are of a miner bringing home his coal for the day or the nude form of a woman on a rocky beach…..READ MORE HERE

 

and here is another about Gregory Crewdson

“My pictures must first be beautiful, but that beauty is not enough. I strive to convey an underlying edge of anxiety, of isolation, of fear. ” – Gregory Crewdson

Few photographers have had such a dramatic impact on photography as Gregory Crewdson. Like Richard Avedon or Henri Cartier-Bresson before him, Crewdson fundamentally changed not only the photographic language, but also the process of creating images and, in doing so, established himself as one of the most visionary photographers of the last decade. His photographs hang in museums, galleries and private collections all over the world and can sell for upwards of $100,000, but seeing him on the set of one of his productions, you might think he looks more like a film director than what has traditionally been the image of a photographer. In fact, he rarely even presses the shutter button. “I prefer not to be behind the camera,” he says, “because I want the most direct experience with the subject as possible.” Creating one of his photographs means dozens of crew members, unbelievably large budgets, and magnificent environments that require sets to be built or streets and neighborhoods to be temporarily shut down. Large in scale and obsessively detailed, they are made even bigger by what the viewer doesn’t see. “In all my pictures,” he says “what I am ultimately interested in is that moment of transcendence or transportation, where one is transported into another place, into a perfect, still world.” READ MORE HERE

 

The people behind Faded + Blurred are Jeffery Saddoris is a mixed media artist and designer whose love for photography started in the darkroom of his high school photo class. Jeffery is also the co-host of the weekly photography podcast, On Taking Pictures on the 5by5 Network. Nicole Rae (Nikki) is a food and fine art photographer. In 2008, Nikki won the Aperture photo contest, just one year after picking up a camera. In 2012, she co-wrote and photographed Chill, an eBook all about ice cream. See her fantastic food photography at Simmer & Shoot.

I would suggest you hurry over to their wonderful blog site for more of what you love 

100 Most influential photographers of all time

From Professional Photographer magazine we find this intriguing post, there is no doubt a list like this will generate some debate but I doubt any of your favourites will be missing

Richard Avedon American 1923-2004
Avedon was the epitome of the modern photographer – a charming, sophisticated man-about-town and a photographer who was able to cross photographic genres. It did not matter where he was, which format he chose to work with or who his subject was, the image would be an Avedon image. It would have that unmistakeable elegance and confidence that marked him out, not just as a great photographer but as a highly successful commercial photographer, who was able to create instantly iconic and memorable images. So what’s his influence? His large-format portrait style with the stark white background, his use of two images to tell one portrait story, his use of strobe lights in fashion, the book In The American West? Of course it’s all this and more.Avedon is a photographer whom every photographer should get to know via his books. They cover his whole career and not only chart his own photographic and personal development but also, that of commercial photography over the last half of the twentieth century. Quite simply he is our No.1.www.richardavedon.com

here are the next nine, to see all one hundred go here

 

 2. W. Eugene Smith American 1918-1978

Intense and at times obsessed with his work. He helped establish the photo story and the power of black & white printing. www.smithfund.org

3. Helmut Newton German 1920-2004
Newton created erotically charged and powerful images of women, and developed the use of ring flash in fashion images. www.helmutnewton.com

4. Irving Penn American 1917- 2009
Every portrait shot in the corner of a room or simple symbolic still life owes something to Penn. He is the established genius of American Vogue magazine.www.irvingpenn.com

5. Guy Bourdin French 1928-1991
No one has been more imitated over the last few years in fashion and art photography than Bourdin. Erotic, surreal and controversial. www.guybourdin.org

6. Henri Cartier-Bresson French 1908-2004
The creator of ‘The decisive moment’. He never cropped his images and only shot in black & white. A Leica-wielding legend.

7. Diane Arbus American 1923-1971
Freaks, loners and people on the edges of society’s norms were Arbus‘s subjects. Her direct and simple portrait style and subject matter have inspired ever since.www.diane-arbus-photography.com

8.Elliott Erwitt French 1928-
Magnum member and humorous observer of everyday life. His juxtapositions of form and images of dogs show art is where you find it. www.elliotterwitt.com

9. Walker Evans American 1903-1975
The chronicler of American life who brought a detached observer’s eye to all of his images. He created order and beauty through composition where there was none.

10. Martin Parr British 1952-
Parr’s use of intense colour and his ability to raise the snapshot to the level of art has led to him being recognised as the master chronicler of the every day.www.martinparr.com