An Autobiography Richard Avedon
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Photography & Video
An Autobiography Richard Avedon Details
From Publishers Weekly In this oversize assemblage of 284 photographs, a loose record of faces, moments and events that have shaped his life, eminent photographer Avedon excels in brutally frontal, stark black-and-white portraits that strip away pretensions and personas. Ezra Pound, Marilyn Monroe, Louis Armstrong, Rudolf Nureyev, Dorothy Parker, Janis Joplin, Andy Warhol, Samuel Beckett, Malcolm X and Alberto Giacometti are among the luminaries indelibly captured. The juxtapositions of images are often meant to provoke or unsettle. Poet Allen Ginsberg, in a nude embrace with his lover Peter Orlovsky, shares facing pages with dour Henry Kissinger. There are intimate family snapshots, glimpses of the fashion world, documentary photos of the civil rights struggle. Faces of a Colorado meat packer, a Texas trucker, mental hospital patients, Vietnamese napalm victims and corpses in Sicilian catacombs jostle against shots of Isak Dinesen, Gerald Ford, debutantes and rock singers, generating an implicit dialogue about power and powerlessness, fame and illusion. A haunting portrait of our age. First serial to Newsweek; BOMC alternate. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. Read more From Library Journal Readers expecting a memoir might initially be mystified by this compendium of splendidly reproduced photographs, but it makes sense for the renowned Avedon, once chief photographer at Harper's Bazaar and Vogue and now the first staff photographer at The New Yorker , to reconsider his life through images. This is no literal retelling of events; as Avedon notes in his brief preface, "I haven't lived chronologically. No one does." Avedon instead divides his images into three sections representing stages in the inevitable role-playing of life: "sermons of bravado," that celebratory phase when we are feeling our power; our exploration of roles we have adopted; and, finally, the moment when those roles lock us in. The divisions may not always seem so distinctive, but readers browsing through images of the well known--socialites, politicians, artists--and the unknown--street performers, the mentally ill, victims of napalm--will come away with a clear sense of Avedon's ability to make the ordinary extraordinary. Ultimately, this is an "autogiography" of us all--our hopes, disenchantments, and persistent vulnerability. Highly recommended. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/93.- Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. Read more See all Editorial Reviews
Reviews
This is a big and heavy book.All pictures are black and white. No text, only pictures. The print is very good. Each picture cover all the page (much bigger than a A4). My only complain is the few number of pictures spread in two pages. I don't like pictures divided in this way.Except for the two-pages pictures, the book oposes two pictures, one in each page. Many comparisons are poweful, funny or interesting, but others are not. For instance, see the pages with the snake-hunter and Truman Capote, or the pages with Dick Hickcock and his father, etc.There are many portraits, a few fashion pictures (too few) and a lot of "reportage" pictures. Portraits are the most interesting pictures of the book.The book is organized in three parts. The three parts combine the three types of pictures (portraits, fashion, reportage), but the mixture is different in each case. I love parts 1 and 2 but the selection of the part 3 is strange, with many pictures taken at a mental hospital, victims of the napalm in Vietnam, etc. Most of these pictures are heavily granulated.To sum-up, the quality of the book is very high, very interesting, great prints... but the selection is not 100% of my liking in the third part of the book.