Fashion and portrait photographer Richard Avedon (1923-2004) used harsh lighting and bare backgrounds to capture intimate details in black-and-white images. His early work with Harper's Bazaar, Vogue and other outlets broke from standard models of unemotive fashion photography by using smiling or laughing subjects reacting to the camera. Avedon's portraiture maintained a minimalist aesthetic, developing inner lives through stark external details. His large prints have been featured in multiple major exhibitions, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1978 and 2002. Avedon's work has also been released in coffee-table books. Perhaps his most famous collection is In the American West (1985), a stark departure from his usual subjects, in which Avedon toured the western United States to photograph farmers, truckers, miners and other members of the working class.
Avedon's second published collection, Nothing Personal (1964), was a collaboration with author and childhood friend James Baldwin whose choice of subjects defies easy categorization. Odd pairs are juxtaposed on facing pages, like a nude Allen Ginsberg striking a Buddhist pose opposite American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell. Other pairings suggest Avedon's social consciousness, such as members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee across from a centenarian born into slavery. Nothing Personal's portrait of Americans united or divided along elusive, sometimes messy lines will find a new audience with Taschen's reprinted edition of the book, featuring an essay by critic Hilton Als ($69.99, 9783836569538). --Tobias Mutter
