Avedon had been looking at Snow’s Bazaar for years. “I was brought up on Harper’s Bazaar, Vanity Fair, and Vogue,” he said. The magazines reflected the dreams of his parents. His father, Jacob “Jack” Avedon, was a forbidding, remote, demanding, embittered American of Russian Jewish descent. Born on the boat that brought him here, abandoned by his father, taken from his mother, raised in part in an orphanage on the Lower East Side, he owned a Fifth Avenue women’s clothing store with a brother. Dick’s mother, Anna, hailed from a garment-manufacturing family well enough off to have had a carriage and horses in the days before automobiles. Like Snow, Dick grew up breathing the heady scent of style. The Avedon emporium was high-end. “I was surrounded by women who believed in clothes,” Avedon said. “I learned how deep their love of surface went.”
He was born in 1923, and photography was a part of his life from the beginning. His father taught him the basics, and he was already taking photographs with his family’s Kodak box Brownie when he joined the YMHA Camera Club at age twelve in 1935. “When I was a boy,” he once wrote, “my family took great care with our snapshots. . . . We posed in front of expensive cars, homes that weren’t ours. We borrowed dogs. . . . All of the photographs in our family album were built on some kind of lie about who we were, and revealed a truth about who we wanted to be.”
The family’s fortunes were traced in real estate. Dick spent Saturdays at the family’s store in a six-story Italian Renaissance mansion at Fifth Avenue and Fortieth Street. When Dick was three in 1926, and his sister Louise one, the family moved to a stucco house in Cedarhurst, a suburban town on Long Island. Four years later, at the start of the Depression, when Avedon’s went out of business after Jack’s brother lost his money in bad investments, Jack became an insurance salesman. In 1931, the family moved to East Ninety-Eighth Street near Fifth Avenue, where Dick slept in a windowless dining alcove that he decorated with fashion photos. When Jack became a buyer at a women’s clothing store in 1932, they moved to East Eighty-Sixth Street.
“The family emphasis was on survival, being educated, being a provider, and living up to the world,” Avedon said. His father, whom he called The Judge, focused on responsibility, strength, and the power of appearances. “Life was a battle and you had to be armed for it.” Dick’s mother cared about progressive politics, intellect, and creativity. “Somehow, I got the message that I had to be one kind of person to please my mother, another to please my father.”
Dick was a young celebrity collector, “a manic autograph hound,” he recalled, who once tracked Salvador Dalí to his New York hotel suite to get his name on a scrap of paper. The surrealist painter came to the door wearing a snake; behind him, his wife, Gala, posed in the nude. The experience stayed with Avedon, and in years to come he would ask women to pose with snakes, leading to his famous poster image of the nymphet actress Nastassja Kinski wearing nothing but a python. Initially, Avedon was satisfied with signatures of celebrities, from Einstein to Toscanini. Sergey Rachmaninoff, the composer, who lived in the same apartment house as Avedon’s grandparents, became his first photographic portrait subject. “I was a family gag,” he said later. “It was my way of saying, I want to get out of this apartment, this family, this world, and this is the world I want to join. I want to be one of those people. It started with getting their autographs. Then I started to photograph . . . people who performed their emotions.”
In the most autobiographical of his books of photographs, Evidence: 1944–1994, Avedon included one of himself in his first fedora and double-breasted suit, taken the year of his thirteenth birthday. There is no record of whether he had a bar mitzvah, but that photo could easily have recorded the moment. “I’m such a Jew, but at the same time completely agnostic,” he said.
Dick attended DeWitt Clinton, then an elite high school in the Bronx, where he was an academic failure but, as a senior, edited Magpie, the school’s literary and art magazine. A classmate, the future novelist James Baldwin, was its literary editor. That same year, Dick won first prize in an inter–high school poetry competition, beating thirty-one other students with a poem entitled “Spring at Coventry.” An oft-repeated claim that he won a title, Poet Laureate of New York’s high schools, can’t be confirmed.
By then, he was taking fashion photographs, often using his sister, Louise, as his model as he copied the styles of Frissell, Dahl-Wolfe, and Munkácsi, whose photos he’d pasted to his bedroom walls. He said, “The longings of my almost adolescence were focused on them.” He was fixated, too, on his sister. “We all photographed Louise,” he said of his family. “Her beauty was the event of her life.” Though she was painfully shy, their mother told her that she was so pretty, she didn’t need to talk. Her shyness seemed to grow as she aged. The cause, it would turn out, was incipient mental illness.
The seventeen-year-old Avedon either failed or dropped out of DeWitt Clinton (both have been reported) in 1941 and briefly took courses in either literature or philosophy (again, reports differ) at Columbia University, where he would return for the 1948–49 school year, but never graduate. He also studied sculpture at the Art Students League and dreamed of being a poet—he’d long read his poems aloud to a cousin and had published a few for twenty-five cents a line in local newspapers, but “grew up with not just a sense, but a knowledge, that I was a failure,” he said. His father was appalled by Dick’s flailing in the arts. “He wanted me to be his kind of person,” Avedon said, “and to have a son who was an artist wasn’t the best news.”
He got a job as a darkroom and errand boy for two photographer brothers from Brooklyn. Steve and Mike Elliot (née Lipset) had a studio near Carnegie Hall. The Elliots were childhood neighbors who’d first encountered Avedon while delivering newspapers. Dick worked in their studio until Mike joined the merchant marine and Steve, the army.
In 1942, Avedon joined America’s naval auxiliary fleet, too. Equipped with a going-away present from his father, a new Rolleiflex, Dick became a photographer’s mate second class, stationed at the Sheepshead Bay Maritime Service station, an under-construction training center in Brooklyn, New York, that was “a mire of muddy paths and partly constructed buildings.” Avedon shot identification photos of the sailors in America’s Victory Fleet. “I must have taken pictures of maybe one hundred thousand baffled faces before it ever occurred to me I was becoming a photographer,” he wrote, almost certainly exaggerating for effect. He and Mike Elliot also ran and took pictures for The Helm and The Mast, the base magazines. Elliot was editor and Avedon his assistant.
Early on, Avedon began shaping his own narrative. Stephen Elliot, Steve’s son, repeats a family legend that his father told Avedon he needed a nose job, and the eager young man took his advice. “His wiry body appear[ed] even more slender because he often dressed in black suits,” the writer Patricia Bosworth observed. “Terrified of gaining weight, he existed sometimes on a spoonful of peanut butter a day.” Avedon would often tell his origin stories in different ways, fudging some details, leaving out others, revealing a knack for self-mythologizing. When his service ended, Avedon felt paralyzed. “I couldn’t speak, I couldn’t cope,” he said, until a psychoanalyst helped ease his passage into adulthood. He would seek professional psychological help throughout his life.
Dick brought his photos for The Helm and The Mast when he sought out Alexey Brodovitch. Accounts of their meeting differ. In the most coherent if not most logical story, Carmel Snow’s biographer Rowlands says he’d decided Brodovitch was the key to his future and made fourteen appointments with him, dressed up in his best suit each time, only to hear from the Bazaar’s receptionist that the great man had changed his mind. Avedon even dropped samples of his work at Brodovitch’s apartment, impressing the art director with his persistence and gaining an audience—but only because Brodovitch was fed up with Hoyningen-Huené and Dahl-Wolfe’s diva antics. Rowlands says Dick enrolled in the Design Laboratory, and six months later Brodovitch announced that Dick had earned a royal audience. “He brought m
e to Snow,” Avedon said in 1992. “Huené and Dahl-Wolfe ruled the roost, [but] they’d tired of the hierarchy of the stars.”
Avedon is said to have paid his Design Laboratory tuition with money made selling photographs to Bonwit Teller, a Fifth Avenue department store; he’d walked in wearing his uniform and asked if he might borrow some clothes and take pictures for the store for free. He then reportedly hired the most expensive model in New York, Bijou Barrington, to ensure their quality. “The management decided to hang them in the elevators,” he recalled. “I rode up and down on the elevators, listening hopefully for customers’ comments on my pictures. I didn’t hear one.” A week later, Bonwit Teller gave Avedon his first assignment, a picture of a girl in a bathing suit. He hitchhiked to the beach with a model to shoot it, “for lack of bus fare,” he said, and was paid $7.50. A year later, in another version of the story, Brodovitch came around. “Finally, he agreed to see me,” Avedon said.
At the Design Laboratory, he and Brodovitch tangled over an assignment to “make” a neon sign in Times Square. Avedon “tried to weasel out of it,” he recalled, “by saying, ‘Mr. Brodovitch, I’m a photographer and I don’t know how to make a neon sign. Could you give me another assignment?’ He didn’t look up. He just answered, ‘Why not to use spaghetti?’ I found some pipe cleaners and made them into a sign. From that moment, I never looked back.”
Carmel Snow gives the story a different spin: “A slim, dark, eager young man wearing the uniform of the Merchant Marine came into the art department. Brodovitch opened his portfolio with the slightly jaded hope with which my fiction editor opened a manuscript by a new writer,” she wrote years later. “What he saw—pictures of seamen in action—made Brodovitch ask the boy to try doing fashions for the young in the same manner. And when I saw the results, I knew that in Richard Avedon we had a new, contemporary Munkácsi.”
An aging Brodovitch later remembered young Avedon as “neurotic completely. He was completely out of kilter. He went to different psychiatrists and they straightened him out very well. He just dropped in my office and he showed me very amateurish photographs, just snapshots.” But after a couple of lunches, “I felt he had enthusiasm.” He joined the Design Laboratory and “after three or four lessons” got a first assignment.
Some of Avedon’s Sheepshead Bay photos—including one of a pair of brothers, one of them in focus, the other not—captured motion in the same way Brodovitch had when he photographed the ballet. Brodovitch focused on that shot. “He liked the blur,” the New Yorker would later report. “If you can bring that tension to fashion,” Brodovitch told Dick, “I might be interested.”
Regardless of how he got there, Dick’s first professional magazine work was for Junior Bazaar, which had debuted in March 1943 as a magazine within an issue of Harper’s Bazaar with the teenaged Vreeland discovery Lauren Bacall on the cover photographed by Dahl-Wolfe. Avedon remembered his first shoot as a failure. “I tried to do what I thought Harper’s Bazaar wanted,” he said, and shot a model “in the manner of Louise Dahl-Wolfe.” Planned as a fourteen-page spread, it ended up three small photos on two pages after Brodovitch told him, “This has nothing to do with what I expect of you.” So Avedon asked if he could try again without fashion editors “because they frightened me . . . and I had to do it my way.”
Over the years, he would conflate several early shoots into one as he recounted the story of what followed, also dropping his age at the time to nineteen, when he was actually twenty-three. “So I took my own models out to the beach,” he told the writer Nora Ephron, and “photographed them barefoot, without gloves, running along the beach on stilts, playing leapfrog. When the pictures came in, Brodovitch laid them out on the table and the fashion editor said, ‘These can’t be printed. These girls are barefoot.’ ” Brodovitch overruled the unnamed editor (likely Vreeland), and a six-page spread resulted. “After that,” Avedon said, “I was launched very quickly. Those candid snapshots were in direct contrast to what was being done. I came in at a time when there weren’t any young photographers working in a free way.” Brodovitch alternately recalled Avedon’s first photos as excellent and “technically very bad. But [the pictures] had freshness and individuality and they showed enthusiasm and a willingness to take chances.”
To Avedon, Brodovitch, a better father figure than his real one, was “withdrawn and disciplined” with “very strong values. He gave no compliments. . . . I responded to the toughness and the aristocracy of mind and the standards.” A maternal figure added warmth to the equation. “The humanity came from Carmel Snow,” Dick said. So, too, did introductions to her Parisian circle, dinner invitations, recommendations of books to read and artists to see, and a contract with the Bazaar for a term of ten years, though it paid only $75 to $100 a page. The Bazaar “paid less than anybody,” said Lillian Bassman, who then worked as an art director under Brodovitch.
Chapter 5
* * *
“DO YOU KNOW RICHARD AVEDON?”
Before his Bazaar debut in spring 1945, Avedon married Dorcas Nowell, a wide-eyed, bookish bank clerk whom he renamed Doe for her startled expression and turned into his model. She’d had a cinematic childhood. Her father had been valet to the king of Siam before going to work as head butler to F. Ambrose Clark, grandson of the founder of Singer Sewing Machines and the builder of New York’s famous Dakota apartment house. Her mother, Clark’s head maid, died when Doe was two, and after her father died ten years later, Clark raised her as his own on his several estates.
Doe resembled Dick’s wide-eyed sister, Louise, but was outgoing and curious, her opposite in temperament. Louise’s emotional problems had grown severe, and shortly after Dick married Doe, Louise was institutionalized; she would die in 1968 at Rockland State Hospital. “She was damaged by her beauty,” Avedon later allowed. “I believe beauty can be as isolating as genius, but without its rewards.” Avedon dramatized the tragedy of Louise as his inspiration. “The conspiracy between her beauty, her illness and her death, was like a shadow that went right through her and into my photographs,” he wrote to the critic Jane Livingston in 1993.
He often told the story of how, as a child in Cedarhurst, he taped a photographic negative of Louise’s image on his upper arm for several days one summer, burning it into his skin. “When I began to photograph in my adult years, all the models I was drawn to and the faces I was drawn to were memories of my sister,” white-skinned brunettes with oval faces, fine noses, and elongated necks, he’d explain. “And something that I knew about Louise and the women in the house would enter the photographs. Complicated. The feeling as a child that women were simply another country. I will never understand them. That’s in some of the pictures. Endlessly fascinating to me.”
Lillian Bassman begged to differ. She and her husband, Paul Himmel, shared a summer house on the Fire Island barrier beach with Dick and Doe from 1946 to 1948. She called foul on Avedon’s romanticizing his sister. “She was no tremendous beauty,” Bassman scoffed in a 1994 interview. “She was a rather pretty girl with no real presence, and he certainly didn’t create these girls in her image.” Avedon’s real fascinations, Bassman said carefully, were androgyny and theatricality. The summer community they chose had plenty of both. Cherry Grove attracted entertainers, artists, and homosexuals; in more “out” times, it would become well known as a gay mecca.
Whether or not she was a Louise replacement, Doe was a Junior Bazaar sort of girl—and from the very start, Avedon had approached the task of finding models with focused enthusiasm. “We used to scout the streets,” Bassman recalled. “He’d watch girls for days. Every photographer had girls they were in love with and used over and over.”
Years later, Doe would tell a daughter, Anney Siegal-Wamsat, the story of her discovery. Dorcas worked in a bank but aspired to be a model, heard about Avedon, and learned where he lived. En route to his door, she literally bumped into the scrawny (125 pounds), myopic, five-foot-seven-inch photographer bounding down the stairs. “Do yo
u know Richard Avedon?” she asked, mispronouncing his name. “Sparks flew, and that was the beginning of everything,” says Siegal-Wamsat. “He was very young,” D. D. Ryan, the Bazaar fashion editor, similarly observed. “She was very young. They probably should never have married to begin with.”
Richard Avedon never limited himself to shooting fashion. He was already reaching for more in 1946, when he shot images on the streets of New York and Rome that remained unpublished for decades, but placed him squarely in what the critic Jane Livingston called the New York School, a disparate group of influential midcentury photographers. Curiously, Avedon distrusted that side of his talent. In 1949, he would accept an assignment from Life magazine to shoot an entire issue on New York and spend six months on the project. “And then I simply felt I couldn’t publish the photographs,” he explained. “I realized these pictures followed a tradition that already existed, and that seemed dangerous. I wanted to find my own metaphors, and I turned to something else.” He returned Life’s money and never showed the photographs. That something else, the flow of metaphors he used to reinvent the visual presentation of fashion, was already pouring out of him.
Now that he was working for the Bazaar, Avedon rented a studio nearby and would eagerly race the seven blocks to Hearst’s offices, wet contact sheets and prints in hand, to see his new family, “with joy, with pleasure,” he said. Snow taught him what made a superior picture. Bassman became a coconspirator. But Avedon was destined for bigger things than Junior Bazaar. On a trip to Paris in 1946, he shot Doe in the Gare du Nord, and that photo soon appeared in “big” Bazaar. The following January, he shot his first cover. Then, in summer 1947, Snow gave him his first taste of the big time and took him to Paris for the French collections. Her biographer says she only did so after he threatened to bolt for Vogue. Though their work was complementary rather than competitive, the prickly Louise Dahl-Wolfe, by then in her fifties and twice Avedon’s age, was not amused. But fashion’s guard was changing. Just in time for the Paris collections the summer before, Edna Chase had finally handed the reins of Vogue to an underling, Jessica Daves, forty-eight, another dowdy paragon of the absence of chic. Though Chase would haunt the corridors of Vogue for a few more years, the start of her slow exit was another sign of the end of an era.
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