My wife and I recently took advantage of a required trip back to the UK
to spend a few days in Paris. Aside from a dollar that sucked and the
100% smoking rate of Parisians the trip was wonderful and one of the
highlights of our trip was the opportunity to see the Richard Avedon
retrospective at the Jeu de Paume more than a year before it will
arrive at SF MoMA.
It is difficult not to lump Richard Avedon in with other successful
giants of modern portrait photography; Diane Arbus, Erving Penn, Annie
Leibowitz (with whom he shares top billing this summer in Paris). They
are the first wave of modern portrait photographers – the first to
reject beauty for 'reality' which some critics condemn as 'cruel'
photography. More on this later, however, the influence of these
rock-stars of portrait photography is impossible to ignore and to pass
up the opportunity to see this exhibit would have been spiteful.
Love him or hate him (and all these photographers have something of a
polarizing effect on audiences and critics) you have to admit that
Avedon's work is impactful especially in the flesh. He was one of the
first photographers that pioneered the bigger-is-better philosophy to
his prints and so you encounter many of his subjects in this exhibit
larger than life size with every pore, blemish and hair high lit. A
modest print of Warhol and the Factory crew that we had seen a couple
of days before in the “Street and Studio” exhibit at the Tate Modern
was interesting but seen 9 meters long its impact and implied gravitas
was infinitely greater; I don't know if that makes it a better photo or
not – that's a question for a more knowledgeable critic than I.
But I get a head of myself; the exhibit itself was laid out
chronologically and is exhaustive. True, you've probably seen most of
these pictures before in books and a few of them in other exhibits but
you're unlikely to have seen this volume and depth of Avedon's oeuvre
as exhibition prints before. In the Jeu de Paume the exhibition filled
much of display space of two floors of the building with rooms devoted
to specific periods starting with his earlier fashion work and
progressing through celebrity portrait work to his common man opus, In
the American West, and beyond. It took a good two hours to go through.
The lighting of the prints was top class, a standard I hope SF MoMA
will live up to, as was the spacing and pacing. Most of the standard
prints are presented in plain white gallery frames with white mats
against white walls. Captions and commentary (both in French and
English thankfully) are applied directly to the walls themselves as
seems to be the modern custom. Overall the effect is conservative but
it allows the prints to speak for themselves. The larger prints are
displayed mounted on aluminum and they tower over the viewer,
especially when you consider Avedon's penchant for cropping the head of
his subjects close to the top and in the top 20% of the frame. Half of
the larger prints are displayed against black walls as opposed to white
– exquisitely lit they glow like black and white windows into another
time and place.
Some think that Avedon is over-rated – a charge that seems to be
leveled at anyone in the art photography field with a commercial
background or achieving great commercial success, both blasphemies
Avedon was guilty of. I'll concede that he wasn't the most innovative
or intellectual of photographers but this did not lessen my enjoyment
of this exhibit. I did not tire of his simple trick of isolating his
subjects against the plainest of white backgrounds, of capturing
excruciating detail and of printing in dramatic sizes. Once I got away
from his celebrity subjects and to the hard working oil men, ranchers,
homeless and manual laborers it was hard not to stare and wonder if you
were looking deep into someone else's life and soul. Perhaps that isn't
the heart and soul of his subjects but instead a grotesque world from
the imagination of Avedon himself, it really didn't matter to me; I
went away moved and inspired and I personally can ask no more of art.
The exhibit tours other venues in Europe before coming to San Francisco
in the Fall of 2009. When it arrives I'm sure it will be a massive hit
here as it is the kind of photography and blockbusting exhibit the West
Coast loves. I look forward to seeing this exhibit again and, in the
meantime, I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to see this
preview in Paris.
Other Opinions:
www.artslant.com/ew/articles/show/1841
blog.toroptsov.com/2008/07/richard-avedon.html
fugitivevision.blogspot.com/2008/07/avedon-at-jeu-de-paum...
www.berlinerfestspiele.de/en/aktuell/festivals/11_gropius... 
