ICONIC AVEDON: A CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION OF RICHARD AVEDON
Gagosian is pleased to presents Iconic Avedon: A Centennial Celebration of Richard Avedon, at the gallery on rue de Ponthieu, Paris. The word iconic applies equally to their maker, and is used here to illuminate his exceptional influence on culture today.
January 22 – March 2, 2024
Soon after establishing his New York studio in the mid-1940s, Avedon developed an inventive, sophisticated, and instantly recognizable style. As a staff photographer for Harper’s Bazaar (1944–65), and later Vogue (1966–88), he produced many of the publications’ quintessential images. As Avedon’s reputation grew, the defining figures of the twentieth century—performers, writers, artists, intellectuals, and other notables—were drawn to see themselves through his lens. Avedon produced images that became synonymous with the legends of his sitters. Featuring his photographs of subjects both renowned and obscure, the exhibition highlights the innovative role Avedon played as a creator of icons.
Avedon’s most incisive portraits manifest his uncanny ability to elicit the singular vitality of his sitters, inscribing their charged essences—even those of the already famous—in decisive frames extracted from the larger arc of living history.
Opening during the 2024 Haute Couture Week in Paris, Iconic Avedon is centered by Avedon’s deep connection to the city that was an early proving ground. Beginning in 1947, the photographer returned regularly to Paris to photograph collections for Harper’s Bazaar during couture week, working with editors Carmel Snow, Diana Vreeland, and Nancy White, and designers such as Christian Dior, not only to create a bold new vision of the modern woman but also to restore luster to the great city after World War II.
Portraying models in motion and on the street, liberated from the confines of the studio, he made many of his best-known pictures in Paris, including Dovima with elephants (1955) and Brigitte Bardot (1959). In midcentury Paris he also captured, with élan, now-classic images of Dorian Leigh (1949), Suzy Parker (1957–58), Coco Chanel (1958), and Alberto Giacometti (1958) that appear in the exhibition.
Aware of his own image-making power, Avedon subjected himself to his own scrutiny. In a photomat self-portrait taken the year he published Nothing Personal (1964), conceived jointly with former classmate James Baldwin, he covered the left half of his face with a cropped portrait of his collaborator (Baldwin was unable to make the scheduled sitting), underscoring their bond shortly after the fraught passage of the Civil Rights Act. In a later self-portrait from 1993, the craggy contours of Avedon’s sixty-nine-year-old face are shown with no guise at all.
Iconic Avedon, with exhibition design by Cécile Degos, follows the 2023 exhibition Avedon 100 at the gallery in New York, which featured photographs selected by over 150 prominent artists, designers, musicians, writers, curators, and fashion world representatives, who elaborate in the accompanying catalogue on the impact of Avedon’s work today.