To know Dick Avedon was to know the sun. He radiated out, early and daily, on a circle of friends and family and colleagues, who drew on his light and warmth for sustenance. When he died, last week, at the age of eighty-one, some light seemed to go out in many lives and around many pleasures. For, though he was incandescent in his presence, he was surprisingly domestic in his enthusiasms; he believed in family as passionately as he believed in art, and could leave an hour-long conversation about Goya’s horrors to talk with the same avidity about how to light a room or roast a leg of lamb.
In the arc of a career that stretched for sixty full years—from the epoch-making postwar Parisian fashion photographs in Harper’s Bazaar to the exhibition of his portraits at the Metropolitan Museum two years ago—he suffered, just a little, from the knowledge that the vigor of his presence might eclipse the rigor of his work. But the two sides of his nature, and his psyche, were really one. Though he held a tragic view of life, he brought to that view a grace and mischief and energy that stripped the existentialist position of its sourness and made despair about the final outcome of life a reason to live all the more. His best-known photographs, from the Parisienne leaping over a puddle in high heels to his dying father’s desperate face, all share a belief in the heroism of self-assertion, a belief that every leap is a leap of faith. His definitive portraits of the powerful and the powerless—encompassing, in a manner almost without equal in the history of portraiture, the artistic and political hierarchies of the past half century of American life—were almost Roman in their severe authority. But they were not the negation of his dancing and delighted fashion photographs, as critics sometimes thought: the portraits were the solid, mineral form of what was, in the fashion pictures, pure liquid. Both were studies in human performance: how we prepare a face to face the world, and how the world shows itself in our faces. As long as people remain curious about life in the twentieth century, they will turn to Avedon’s photographs to see how it looked, and what it meant.
When Tina Brown brought him to The New Yorker, in 1992, to be its first staff photographer, she was rupturing a long-standing taboo against photography, and even those who loved his work might have had their doubts. But his photographs, in their epigrammatic compression of a whole subject into a single black-and-white image, were New Yorker profiles in miniature, and within weeks it was as if they had always graced these pages. His subsequent work for the magazine ran from an inventory of the faces of Kennedy’s Camelot thirty years later to the enchanted portraits of singers and actors that he made in the past year. In the last weeks of his life, he was completing his most ambitious project for the magazine, a survey of America on the eve of the election, to be called “Democracy.” He was getting ready to take one more portrait when life fled from him. If to know him was to feel in the presence of the sun, to look back on his life is to see that what we really experienced was the track of a comet: breaking barriers between spheres, shattering fixed orbits, bringing joy and amazement and portents of change to those looking on below, and coming to rest at last in earth, still fully alight. ♦
