Rangefinder Magazine
July 2005

Click Here for printable version of this article.

In Avedon’s American West by Judith Bell
After 20 Years the Amon Carter Museum Revisits This Classic Exhibit

A strange thing begins to happen when you look into the faces that the late Richard Avedon photographed for the “American West” project. Taken during the summers from 1979 to 19 4 while Avedon roamed the West “looking for faces he liked,” the 124 photographs shatter stereotypes of a glorified region and incite an immediate identification, an instinctive knowing that evokes responses as unconsciously as a Rorschach inkblot. Whether photographing a ranch hand or a factory worker, Avedon gives it to us straight.

	Patricia Wilde, housekeeper, Kalispell, Montana, 6/12/81 ©1981, The Richard Avedon Foundation. Courtesy Amon Carter Museum.

Take “Patricia Wilde, Housekeeper, Kalispell, Montana, June 12, 19 1,” (page 12) for example. You’ve seen this woman in countless mini marts, on the street in a forgotten town, and maybe when you turn your head a certain way, in the mirror. The tired hair wedded to some idea of a former self, someone younger, more hopeful, the determined wide arc of black eyeliner. And all of it at odds with the disappointment writ large in the lines that run from nose to mouth, in the wry down-turned mouth. Avedon exposes her story, all our stories. They may not be the ones we want to show to the world but his lens finds them.

In 1985, the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, presented “In the American West: Photographs by Richard Avedon.” Assertive, controversial and graphically striking, the portraits in the exhibition generated extensive and, at times, heated discussion about the nature of portraiture, photography and the true identity of the American West. The oversized portraits of working class Westerners have become icons in photographic history, and the project still stands as a definitive expression of the power of photographic art. Small groups of prints from “In the American West” have been periodically exhibited since 19 5, some by Avedon himself for retrospective exhibitions, but a larger portion of the project has not been seen in the United States since its initial tour. From September 17, 2005, to January , 2006, the museum marks the 20th anniversary of the original exhibition with a show of 7 of the original 124 portraits, selected by Avedon and John Rohrbach, Amon Carter Museum senior curator of photographs. Rohrbach began working with Avedon in early 2003 on image selection and installation design. Following Avedon’s death on October 1, 2004, Rohrbach continued to work with The Richard Avedon Foundation to ensure preservation of the photographer’s initial vision for a new generation of visitors.

Allen Silvy, drifter, Route 93, Chloride, Nevada, 12/14/80 ©1980, The Richard Avedon Foundation. Courtesy Amon Carter Museum.

Avedon actually began work on the series at the behest of the Amon Carter Museum’s first director, Mitchell A. Wilder. Avedon had become world famous for elevating fashion photography to an art form. But when Wilder saw Avedon’s July 4, 197 portrait of a ranch foreman from Ennis, Montana, he asked the artist to continue making photographs under the sponsorship of the museum. He gave the photographer free license to photograph his view of the American West.

Avedon agreed to Wilder’s proposal. From 1979 to 19 4, he traveled through 13 states and 1 9 towns from Texas to Idaho, conducting 752 sittings and exposing 17,000 sheets of film through his x10-inch Deardorff view camera. Focusing on the rural West, Avedon visited ranches and rodeos, but he also went to truck stops, oil fields and slaughterhouses. Rather than playing to the Western myths of grandeur and space, he sought out people whose appearance and life circumstances were the antithesis of mythical images of the ruggedly handsome cowboy, beautiful pioneer wife, dashing outdoor adventurer or industry mogul. The subjects he chose for the portraits were ordinary people, coping daily with personal cycles of boom and bust.

Instead of glamorizing these figures, he brought their various human frailties to the forefront. He worked with a seamless white backdrop that removed any reference to place, and many of the portraits were dramatically oversized, shocking in their stark detail. Avedon’s images continued the undoing of the

American myth, an undoing begun by Robert Frank with his 1950s imagery of America. Avedon’s fascination with what he called “the emotional geography of the face" began during World War II when, while in the Merchant Marines, he shot thousands of troops for their photo IDs. Returning to New York, he spent the next 20 years at Harper’s Bazaar. There, under the tutelage of the legendary art director Alexey Brodovitch, he shot in the company of such photographers as Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Bill Brandt, and Brassai. “A life can begin anywhere,” Avedon said, “and I was completely able to use fashion photography as easily as street pictures or pictures of the Civil Rights Movement or the mental institution to express what I feel about being one of us.”

Petra Alvarado, factory worker, El Paso Texas, on her birthday, 4/22/82 ©1982, The Richard Avedon Foundation. Courtesy Amon Carter Museum.	James Story, coal miner, Somerset, Colorado, 12/18/79 ©1979, The Richard Avedon Foundation. Courtesy Amon Carter Museum.

But his 1960s images of Civil Rights workers and segregationists in the South changed his work, bringing it anew edge. His portraiture took its lead from the drawings and paintings of Expressionist Egon Schiele, who made psychologically probing portraits on a blank ground. But while Schiele’s acutely developed sense of negative space exploits the tension between the contours of his image and the edges of the picture plane, Avedon’s subjects resemble nothing so much as specimens—butterfl ies pinned to the page with all their markings and frailties unmercifully revealed.

Red Owens, oil field worker, Velma, Oklahoma, 6/12/80 ©1980, The Richard Avedon Foundation. Courtesy Amon Carter Museum.

In “Ronald Fischer, Beekeeper, May 9, 19 1” (not shown) the sitter, exposed from bald head to beltline and smeared with queen-bee pheromone so the drones would alight where Avedon wanted them, exhibits a beatifi c calm akin to the medieval imagery of saints. Look closer and there is just the edge of something darker in the pale eyes that leech into the white paper. “The image existed in my imagination long before it became a photo,” Avedon said. “I had to fi nd in the real world what began in my mind.”

Ultimately his portraits are more about vision than documentation. In his introduction to “In the American West” Avedon wrote: “A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion… All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.” In his older portraits—an overwhelmed Marilyn Monroe, Dorothy Parker destroyed, Truman Capote made mean with drink, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor oblivious—and in his last portraits for the New Yorker of such subjects as octogenarian writer Diana Trilling and the Rev. Al Sharpton, we can see the value of his penetrating honesty. There is none of the grandeur of a surface-skimming Yousef Karsh portrait, where the true identity of the famous is hidden behind affected poses and among the props of their trade. “I think real meanness is condescension,” said Avedon, “and making people cosmetically beautiful when the picture isn’t about that.”

	Sandra Bennett, 12-year-old, Rocky Ford, Colorado, 8/23/80 ©1980, The Richard Avedon Foundation. Courtesy Amon Carter Museum.

“The ‘American West’ photographs are as vivid, compelling, and challenging today as they were 20 years ago,” says Rohrbach. “By refusing to play to romantic stereotype, Avedon has drawn important attention to the hardships that often attend life amidst the West’s wide spaces. His oversize prints demand engagement. His sitters induce us to confront our own humanity. One cannot walk away from this show unmoved.”

Here’s the itinerary for Avedon’s “American West”: Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas—September 17, 2005 through January , 2006; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio—June 24 through September 17, 2006; Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona— October 21, 2006, through January 14, 2007; Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, Stanford, California—February 14 through May 6, 2007.

Judith Bell is an art historian and critic based in Richmond, VA. Her work has appeared in American Photo, Art & Antiques, The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine and Elle, among others.