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Richard Avedon ( May 15 , 1923 – October 1 , 2004 ) was an American Photographer . Avedon was able to take his early success in fashion photography and expand it into the realm of Fine Art . PHOTOGRAPHY CAREER Avedon was born in New York City to a Jewish family. After briefly attending Columbia University , he started as a photographer for the Merchant Marines in 1942, taking identification pictures of the crewmen with his Rollei flex camera which was given to him by his father as a going-away present. In 1944, he began working as an advertising photographer for a department store, but was quickly discovered by Alexey Brodovitch , the art director for the fashion magazine '' Harper's Bazaar ''. In 1946, Avedon had set up his own studio and began providing images for magazines including '' Vogue '' and '' Life ''. He soon became the chief photographer for ''Harper's Bazaar''. Avedon did not conform to the standard technique of taking fashion photographs, where models stood emotionless and seemingly indifferent to the camera. Instead, Avedon showed models full of emotion, smiling, laughing, and, many times, in action. In 1966, Avedon left ''Harper's Bazaar'' to work as a staff photographer for ''Vogue'' magazine. In addition to his continuing fashion work, Avedon began to branch out and photographed patients of mental hospitals, the Civil Rights Movement in 1963, protesters of the Vietnam War, and the fall of the Berlin Wall . .]] During this period Avedon also created two famous sets of portraits of The Beatles . The first, taken in late 1966 or very early 1967, became one of the first major rock poster series, and consisted of five striking psychedelic portraits of the group -- four heavily solarised indiviudal colour portraits, and a black-and-white group portrait taken with a Wide-angle Lens . The next year he photographed the much more restrained portraits that were included with '' The White Album '' in 1968. However, Avedon had always been interested in how portraiture captures the personality and soul of its subject. As his reputation as a photographer became widely known, he brought in many famous faces to his studio and photographed them with a large-format 8x10 View Camera . His portraits are easily distinguished by their minimalist style, where the person is looking squarely in the camera, posed in front of a sheer white background. cover photo - Dec. 16, 1948]] He is also distinguished by his large prints, sometimes measuring over three feet in height. His large-format portrait work of drifters, miners, cowboys and others from the western United States became a best-selling book and traveling exhibit entitled ''In the American West'', and is regarded as an important hallmark in 20th Century portrait photography, and by some as Avedon's '' Magnum Opus ''. Commissioned by the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, it was a five-year project Avedon embarked on in the early 1980 s, which produced 125 portraits of people in the American west that caught Avedon's eye. He was drawn to working people such as miners and oil field workers in their soiled work clothes, unemployed drifters, and teenagers growing up in the West circa 1979-84. When first published and exhibited, ''In the American West'' was criticized for showing what some considered to be a disparaging view of America. Avedon was also lauded for treating his subjects with the attention and dignity usually reserved for the politically powerful and celebrities. Avedon was married in 1944 to Dorcas Nowell, a model known professionally as Doe Avedon. After five years, they divorced and in 1951, he married Evelyn Franklin, but they also separated. Hollywood presented a fictional account of his early career in the 1957 musical '' Funny Face '', starring Fred Astaire as the fashion photographer "Dick Avery." Avedon supplied some of the still photographs used in the production. Avedon became the first-ever staff photographer for '' The New Yorker '' in 1992. He has won many awards for his photography, including the International Center of Photography Master of Photography Award in 1993, the Prix Nadar in 1994, and the Royal Photographic Society 150th Anniversary Medal in 2003. On September 25 , 2004 , he suffered a Brain Hemorrhage in San Antonio, Texas while shooting an assignment for '' The New Yorker ''. He died in San Antonio on October 1 . At the time of his death, Avedon was working on a new project entitled ''On Democracy''. The project focuses on the run-up to the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election , and features portraits of the candidates, delegates to the national nominating conventions, and others. The fate of the project is unknown. FAMOUS PHOTOGRAPHS
BOOKS BY RICHARD AVEDON
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