Rangefinder Magazine
July 2005

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Insight/On the Cover by Bill Hurter

Recently my brother-in-law asked me, “What makes a photographer great, or at least collectible, or really noteworthy?” He likes compound questions. Being somewhat of an expert, I said after some thought, “consistency over time and complexity.” But the more I thought about it, I realized there are many “great” photographers not considered great until after their deaths. And there are just as many photographers whose work is all too complex, yet misunderstood. The missing component in my simplistic explanation is empathy. The work of great photographers strikes a common chord in those who experience it. And greatness has seemingly nothing whatsoever to do with taste, beauty or popularity. Great photography transcends everyday existence and offers the intangible connection with the viewer—a message in a bottle. Richard Avedon, long considered one of the greatest American photographers and artists, is featured this month in a story by Judith Bell celebrating his retrospective “American West” exhibit. First revealed in 1985, the images, 124 of them in all, taken during the summer months from 1979 to 1984, represent Advedon’s quest to photograph “faces he liked.” During the five years the project took him to photograph, he exposed some 17,000 sheets of 8x10 film in his Deardorff and made 752 different sittings from Idaho to Texas. The “American West” portraits destroy the glamorized myths of the West and its varied stereotypes and dramatically redefine the conventions of portraiture as an artistic medium. The portraits are shocking in their detail and as challenging today as they were 20 years ago. Avedon, who frequently talked of “the emotional geography of the face,” presents each person acutely, with all of their surface flaws highly visible. Yet the “American West” project is not documentary in form—far from it. Avedon’s portraits carry with them a secondary sharpness far more finely focused than the images themselves. His clarity of vision is so well defined in these images that they demand every bit of your attention. When all of the accolades of greatness are stripped away from Avedon’s reputation, you will find a man who was consumed with the need to express what it is like to be a member of the human race.

Bill Hurter, Editor

PHOTOGRAPHER: Richard Avedon
SUBJECT: Allen Silvy, drifter, Route 93, Chloride, Nevada, 12/14/80
Camera: 8x10 Deardorff view camera
Project: “In the American West”
CREDIT: Copyright © (1980), The Richard Avedon Foundation. Courtesy Amon Carter Museum.
COMMENTS: Richard Avedon’s comments are from the foreward of In The American West, (Abrams), 1985. “Beginning in the spring of 1979 I spent the summer months traveling in the West, going to truck stops, stockyards, walking through the crowds at a fair, looking for faces I wanted to photograph. This is how these portraits were made. I photograph my subject against a sheet of white paper about nine feet wide by seven feet long that is secured to a wall, a building, sometimes the side of a trailer. I work in shade because the sunshine creates shadows, highlights, accents on a surface that seem to tell you where to look. I want the source of light to be invisible so as to neutralize its role in the appearance of things. I use an 8x10 view camera on a tripod…. I stand next to the camera, not behind it, several inches to the left of the lens and about four feet from the subject. As I work I must imagine the pictures I am taking because, since I do not look through the lens, I never see precisely what the film records until the print is made.”