What was startling about the CK One ads was not only that these reproduced In The American West‘s photographic style, but also the look, the gestures, the over all working class demeanor of its subjects. This is not surprising given that Avedon started out as a fashion photographer (he was the basis for Fred Astaire’s character in Funny Face). In the 1990s, this stark black-and-white portraiture style was appropriated in fashion photography, in the campaign for Calvin Klein’s CK One. In The American West originally opened in 1985.
According to curator John Rohrbach, “while some critics might read alienation and despair into these portraits, most of these sitters actually offer no more than benign existentialism”. The photographs were presented as over-sized, unframed prints up to four feet high and eleven feet in length, amplifying their subject’s presence. Amon Carter encouraged and supported Avedon in this project of photographing not “oil barons, ranch owners, and socialites, roustabouts, miners, drifters, and a man covered with bees… working class of America’s supposed classless society”. I saw the Russels and Remingtons there instead on spring break. I missed this Avedon exhibit at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth from to. (Richard Avedon, Foreword, In the American West, New York, Harry N.
These disciplines, these strategies, this silent theater, attempt to achieve an illusion: that everything embodied in the photograph simply happened, that the person in the portrait was always there, was never told to stand there, was never encouraged to hide his hands, and in the end was not even in the presence of the photographer. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in a photograph. The moment an emotion or a fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.
His need to plead his case probably goes as deep as my need to plead mine, but the control is with me.Ī portrait is not a likeness. We have separate ambitions for the image. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about. I want the source of light to be invisible so as to neutralize its role in the appearance of things.Ī portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. I work in the shade because sunshine creates shadows, highlights accents on a surface that seem to tell you where to look. I photograph my subject against a sheet of white paper about nine feet wide by seven feet long that is secured to a wall, a building, sometimes the side of a trailer.
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