“Whether or not people like my portraits of them isn’t the point,” Richard Avedon told The New York Times in 1975. “Each of my portraits is more a portrait of myself than of someone else — a portrait of what I know, what I feel, what I’m afraid of.” A year later, the photographer speculated to Women’s Wear Daily, “I think [my subjects] pose because they want to be told something about themselves that they didn’t know.”
Avedon had not yet reached the midpoint of his half-century-plus career when he said those things, but a stroll through Portraits of Power, the 231-piece Avedon overview at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, confirms his introspection was as crisp as his black-bordered monochrome photographs. Each picture was about its maker, and yet this method yielded as truthful an image of each of his subjects as any other.
But what is truthful about a photograph? Paul Roth, curator of photography and media arts at the Corcoran, points out that when Avedon was a boy, his father would make the family pose for photos with houses, cars and even dogs that didn’t belong to them, creating a false impression of wealth. The lesson? “Photography can lie, and often does.”
But photography can also inspire. The final image in the show is of American University law professor and “Overruling Democracy” author Jamie Raskin. Raskin was initially baffled by the tough guy in the picture of him Avedon made in 2004, but he credits that portrait for giving him the confidence to make his successful run for the Maryland Senate in 2006.
Not all subjects were pleased by what Avedon “told” them. Karl Rove called the photographer “an elitist snob who deliberately set me up,” though that’s an extreme response. Avedon typically came to a shoot having learned as much as he could about the person whose picture he would take. Though he stood beside his archaic, large-format camera instead of behind it to allow him a more intimate connection with his subject, he rarely told them what to wear or do. Astronaut and Sen. John Glenn’s recollection of Avedon as “businesslike” and “well-prepared” seems more typical.
Many of the show’s most striking pieces are from “The Family,” the series of 69 influential Americans circa the bicentennial, commissioned by Rolling Stone and published as 48 text-free pages in the Oct. 22, 1976 issue.
Ideological juxtapositions are emphasized. The Chicago Seven stare across the room from a larger-than-life-size 1969 portrait of the war’s planners taken in Saigon in 1971. A 1963 photo of five uniformed members of the American Nazi Party snapping a “Seig heil!” hangs next to a somber portrait of two black civil rights workers. In a pair of images from “Democracy,” the series Avedon left unfinished at the time of his death, a husband and wife pose with their baby and their AK-47 while, on the wall next to them, a gay male couple smiles with their own young child.
In the unblinking of eye Avedon’s camera, all men, and all women, create themselves equally.
If you go
Richard Avedon: Portraits of Power at the Corcoran Gallery of Art
Through Jan. 25, 2009
Corcoran Gallery of Art
500 17th St. NW
$14; $12 seniors/military; $10 students
Info: corcoran.org
