Focus

by Michael Gross

  Chapter 8

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  A GROWING FASCINATION WITH MORTALITY

  In Carmel Snow’s last days at the Bazaar, the magazine grew stale. After the death of William Randolph Hearst in 1951, the business side of Hearst had begun to flex its muscles, insisting that certain advertisers’ garments be shown in the magazine. Snow, in her sixties, was growing frail. Her habitual lunchtime tippling was becoming more apparent. Avedon often played courtier for her. His devotion and gratitude to his professional “mother” were profound. But the professional managers that the company installed to run things after Hearst’s death were growing concerned and first urged and then insisted that Snow designate a successor.

  Early in 1957, Nancy White, the fashion editor of Good Housekeeping, a distinctly unfashionable publication, was named assistant editor of the Bazaar, positioned to replace Snow, who was both her aunt and godmother. White’s father had been general manager of several Hearst magazines. During the difficult year that followed, Snow rejected some Avedon images. Mary Louise Aswell, who cowrote Snow’s memoirs, says that Snow became “more and more peremptory,” once leaving contact sheets at the San Régis for Avedon with “NO NO” scrawled on them in grease pencil, “exactly like a child scribbling in a book—the paper was actually torn.” Avedon, she reports, “wouldn’t speak to Carmel for months afterward.” But he worked with her again on her first trip to Paris after she handed the reins to Nancy White, when he shot clothes contrasted with rough wooden boards. “Not in my magazine,” Snow barked at him. “I will not have it. I will not have a distinguished dress photographed on a plank.”

  Avedon compared her demeanor that night to that of the dowager empress of Russia. “I was established by then, remember,” he said. “For no one else in the world would I have taken that picture over—not for her, six months before.” But he complied. “She knew she’d been fired. I wouldn’t have dreamed of not obeying her to the letter at that moment.” It was a bad one; she had become quite erratic, culminating in a dreadful incident on her last trip to Paris as editor of the Bazaar. At a party at a Rothschild family mansion, she got so drunk, she urinated all over herself.

  Snow’s last issue appeared at the end of 1957, and White became editor, though like Edna Chase before her, Snow would linger on the fringes for quite some time. Her name appeared above White’s on the masthead, but the world knew her title, chairman of the editorial board, was meaningless.

  Brodovitch, too, was showing his age, and betraying his loss of interest in the Bazaar. Like Snow, he was an alcoholic. Sometimes, he didn’t bother going to the office. His country home in Connecticut burned down. His marriage was loveless and his son troubled, both emotionally and physically. In 1949, Brodovitch had been hospitalized after he was hit by a truck. Another country-house fire in 1957, in Pennsylvania, destroyed his archives, including the negatives of his single—and singular—book Ballet. The next year was his last at the Bazaar; his final issue was in August 1958.

  He continued to collaborate with Avedon, serving as midwife for his emergence as an artist (as opposed to commercial photographer) in fall 1959 with Observations, a book of photographs designed by Brodovitch with text by Truman Capote, which summed up Avedon’s dazzling nonfashion work to that point: it contained celebrity-collector portraits, street photographs, and work that pointed to his more mature future: a growing fascination with mortality, a characteristic that both defied and defined passing fashion. It “established a new standard for opulence and page-by-page discipline in the making of the photographic book,” Jane Livingston wrote, “from its (ruthless) choice of images to their sizing and sequencing . . . to printing and binding.” It had been immediately preceded by a book by another Brodovitch student, William Klein’s New York, in 1956. Neither got good reviews. Indeed, both were greeted with hostility by fine-arts critics—setting up a conflict that would rage for decades. Could fashion photos be art?

  Comparing himself to Klein, Avedon observed that both of them were impelled to “make a moral statement. . . .We needed another way.” Avedon felt they both found direction in the films of Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini. “They expressed something about what it means to be a liberal, humanist-minded person. . . . As photographers, we probably liked the same films more than we liked each other’s work. . . . But as confused as we all were, as competitive as we were, maybe we felt a sense of community.”

  Shortly after the release of Observations, in November 1960, Brodovitch’s wife, Nina, died—and a depression exacerbated by his alcoholism followed and plagued him for the rest of his life, leading to intermittent, sometimes lengthy stays in hospitals. A commitment to the state-run Manhattan State Hospital for the Insane on Wards Island resulted in Brodovitch’s only other cycle of photographs. Avedon told Jane Livingston that he and Brodovitch concocted a spy camera for the project by hiding a tiny Minox inside a cigarette pack with a small hole cut out for the lens.I

  Brodovitch, ill and impoverished (he received no pension from Hearst), retired to France with his son, Nikita, who was gravely injured in an accident shortly before his father died, near Avignon, in 1971. But Brodovitch’s influence endured. “The waves that went out from Harper’s Bazaar since his first issue are still rippling,” Irving Penn would later observe. Noting that he felt precious little affection for him, Penn acknowledged Brodovitch as “our father. . . . There isn’t a man of our time who hasn’t felt the influence of Brodovitch.”

  Of Richard Avedon’s Bazaar family, only his crazy aunt Diana remained in harness, but she was bitter over White’s ascension, feeling she should have been considered for the job. Presumably she knew that Snow was among those who’d lobbied against her, telling the Hearst powers that Vreeland was “a brilliant fashion editor but should never, ever be the editor in chief of a magazine.” Condé Nast, the company, disagreed. In March 1962, Vreeland would join Vogue—and several tense months after that, Jessica Daves would retire and Vreeland would ascend to editor in chief.

  As the survivor at the Bazaar, Avedon was in a position to influence the choice of a replacement for Brodovitch, which was Henry Wolf, an Austrian graphic designer who’d studied under Brodovitch before joining Esquire, where he’d been made the top visual editor at the age of twenty-six in 1952. He didn’t make a good impression on the old guard. Brodovitch had declared him to be “a very good typographer but a very poor picture editor.”

  Louise Dahl-Wolfe’s preeminence at the Bazaar had long since waned. Several times, she tried to get Lillian Bassman fired. “Hated me like crazy,” Bassman said. “I was the one who threatened her the most by bringing in the young photographers, by changing the look of the magazine; that was absolutely diametrically opposed to what she was doing at the time, which was very stylized, very orderly, all very directed. . . . And we were flying. And she hated us.” Barbara Slifka, a Bazaar fashion editor, remembers, “Everyone was always angry.”

  Henry Wolf’s arrival—and his recruitment of new photographers with more modern vision such as Saul Leiter and Louis Faurer—proved to be the last straw for the eminent pioneer. “The new art director put in a surprise visit to my studio and had the presumption to look through my ground glass at what I was photographing,” Dahl-Wolfe wrote later. “This had never happened in all my years. Suddenly, my enthusiasm vanished . . . and so I retired.”

  * * *

  I. Brodovitch’s biographer says another Design Laboratory student, Ben Rose, gave him the Minox. Avedon would make a similar group of photographs at East Louisiana State Hospital in February 1963, while traveling through the South taking photographs for his second book.

  Chapter 9

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  “AN ASPECT OF TRUTH”

  In an extraordinary encounter in 1964, Irving Penn and Richard Avedon—both of whom, though still taking fashion pictures, were doing so with fading enthusiasm—led workshop sessions of Alexey Brodovitch’s Design Laboratory when he was absent or hospitalized. A transcript of those sessions, in the
collection of the Museum of Modern Art, opens with a solo seminar with Penn, who begins by discussing Avedon’s second book, titled Nothing Personal, conceived as his statement about America, which had just been published. “I was much more sour than Jimmy was,” Avedon once said of James Baldwin’s text. Avedon’s intention, he continued, “was to expose the corruption in American life.” His mother’s progressive politics had stayed with him. “The march on the war, against the death penalty, Lenny Bruce, he was behind them all,” China Machado once said.

  Like Penn, Avedon had leveraged his position as the top photographer at one of America’s preeminent newsstand magazines to gain access to celebrities and prominent and powerful people. And like Penn, who squeezed his portrait subjects into corners, Avedon imposed his own vision on them. Penn’s portraits tended to glamorize, Avedon’s to do the opposite. Avedon was influenced by Carl Dreyer’s 1928 film Joan of Arc, he would say, by “its white background, enormous, radically cropped close-ups.”

  Penn and Avedon were both reaching for truth and art in their portraiture, albeit from opposite directions. Though Penn, in his solo session, called Avedon “one of the giants of our time” and “a very remarkable young man,” he also criticized some of Avedon’s portraits as “cruel” and “offbeat” and took his rival to task for editorializing, although he added that Avedon was gutsy and had every right to do so, even as he predicted Nothing Personal would be a “financial disaster.” Much to Avedon’s chagrin, book critics would also be harsh about it, perhaps because it contained only portraits and nonfashion work, but also due to its obvious sympathy for what were then considered radical politics.

  Penn’s passive-aggressive comments revealed his contradictory feelings: “Dick is a very complicated man. Dick is also very much of a little boy.” The ascetic Penn sniffed about Avedon’s lifestyle, “He has a strong taste for high living. . . . Someone told me he and Baldwin mapped this book on a yacht in the Mediterranean.”I Penn seemed to dismiss Avedon as “a journalist . . . always pushing something, much more than I am. He’s a very, very contemporary photographer. He doesn’t seem to know where his great future lies.” Echoing the angry Ed Russell, Penn added, “The question of compassion never seems to come up.”

  Though claiming that the Avedon woman came “out of his cookie cutters,” Penn praised her as “his greatest achievement,” before pulling out his shiv again. “She’s an American woman with long, thin legs and no breasts and a long, thin neck, who’s really not a woman and one whom most of these guys here wouldn’t want in a woman. With brilliant energy, he pulled her together by shrewd manipulation, anger, and insistence. . . . She’s a very real woman and not to be mixed up with any other age. The very way she stands—the curious stance of her feet, planted wide apart, was something unique—a revolution of the nice woman, and the world has changed because of this. He is much more powerful in setting the pace of our times.”

  Avedon joined Penn at a later session and they tangled immediately over the former’s portraits. Penn accused Avedon of sucker punching his subjects, trying to catch them at their worst. “It’s not an accident, it’s something I worked very, very hard to achieve,” Avedon replied. “I feel that the cosmetic approach of portraiture, the ‘nobility of man,’ no matter how beautifully done, is the end of an old idea. . . . A photographer is nothing but a machine unless he editorializes. If he’s an artist at all, he speaks for the way he feels, and it’s a funny little line to draw between the way one man feels and another . . . and call one acceptable or legitimate or okay and the other, not.”

  “People have got to be protected against certain aspects of themselves,” Penn replied, “and allowed themselves, too. . . . But I try to find something that is not momentary, but if possible, something timeless in that person. . . . I try to find a person at a very serene, true, and fairly restful moment. I feel that Dick tries to find them at a moment that has an aspect of truth which is completely momentary.” Penn took particular offense at Avedon’s portrait of a bleary-eyed ex-president Dwight D. Eisenhower.

  “It doesn’t interest me that he was the president of the United States,” Avedon shot back. “It interests me that they all have to face their death, and that terror is in all of us, and in my portraits.” Madness, too. Three years after Brodovitch shot photos inside a mental hospital, Avedon had done the same—the searing pictures were the diametric opposite of chic fashion. He included those pictures in his book, he said, “to help make clear that the line is very thin.”

  On and on they went at it. Penn said his vision was “fatter” than Avedon’s, which was “white-hot . . . momentary, and consequently narrower.” Avedon said he preferred to describe his quest for “the unguarded moment, or in the moment that I helped to create, I feel that I’ve cut through a great deal of façade and have gotten what I feel is truer.” To which Penn replied, “We agree on one thing, that the important thing is to get past the public façade. The job of a photographer [is] to get past this façade.”

  Their way of reaching that point was quite different. “We use the same camera, we use the same way of lighting—to a degree,” Avedon allowed. “I come to a sitting so charged with what I want out of the sitting, before it begins, that I’m almost sick before I start it. And I know that what I have to accomplish has to be done—on my shoulders. . . . I have to make it happen. Penn . . . sits it out. He’s a great poker player, I would assume. . . . You slow it down to your pace and you make it happen your way. It’s just as manipulative as I am. What I try to express of myself in my portraits is very often violent, very often a frightening or a riotous element in myself. . . . Penn creates his atmosphere in search of nobility, I think.”

  Avedon and Penn both nodded toward the changing atmosphere at post-Brodovitch fashion magazines. “The printed page seems to have come to something of a dead end for all of us,” Penn said. “I’ve learned the discipline of not looking at magazines when they come out, because they hurt too much.”

  Avedon said art direction had superseded photography, driving the photographer “away from publication and into his most private feelings.” Both had explored that terrain through portraiture, and a decade earlier Penn had branched out into ethnographic portraiture and nudes of imperfect women; both seemed to be reaction against his work in fashion, similar to Avedon’s gimlet-eyed portraits. By the midsixties, Avedon was “trying to get at the heart of the matter and not depend on steam trains and elephants as props,” Earl Steinbicker observes. “He wanted to regard himself as a portrait, not a fashion, photographer.” A remark about Avedon made by the gallerist Lee Witkin applied equally to him and Penn. Both were “very insecure” about being seen as “merely a fashion photographer.”

  Avedon nonetheless noted similarities between portraits and fashion pictures, saying, “I believe that the fashion photographer’s job is to record the quality of the woman, of that moment he is working.” Edward Steichen’s epochal picture of Marion Morehouse did that job, Avedon said. “She was the essence of the twenties. She stood like the twenties. . . . She was boiled-down essence of the million flappers, plus the elegance of Steichen’s vision of her. . . . Our job is always to report on the woman of the moment. The way she lives, the way she dresses. Our conception of beauty changes and is always changing. . . . We’re both professional enough to know that we’re in the dress business . . . but that we do automatically with . . . the left hand. With the right, we’re trying to draw out a quality in a woman that we feel is beautiful. . . . The new fashion photographer will simply find a new quality in a woman and show it to us.”

  Penn did not object to that. But he strove to accommodate “the point of view of the magazine that I work for,” rather than attempt to make “a much more profound statement of fashion—fashion in living, fashion in feeling, and in thinking, than I would ever dream of attempting or even be interested in attempting. . . .The pictures that I take are individual images that sit inside their rectangle. . . . I don’t attempt to make them profound.
. . . I don’t think the girl’s personality should ever intrude. . . . Dick’s view is a much broader one; in that he’s telling you something about our time. Mine is a very narrow one—you can see a great deal more of the buttons and seams.” Then, Penn admitted the work was wearing thin for him: “I’m pretty tired of girls, and attitude, and dresses.” But he added, “Unconsciously, we cannot avoid saying what we feel at the moment, because we are alive today.”

  When he said that in 1964, the moment was far different from the time in which Penn and Avedon had begun their careers. Penn had already withdrawn from the front lines of fashion. Avedon would linger longer in the field he called “such a delight . . . a reflection of the fun of life” and “a way to recharge myself” for “more demanding work.” But a change was coming, and a new generation of fashion photographers had already appeared, eager to reveal a new woman and make its mark on magazines, on fashion, and on the world.

  * * *

  I. Earl Steinbicker noted that Avedon once had Louis Vuitton make a custom case of black leather (not “those silly LV emblems”) lined with red velvet that held two Rolleiflex cameras, lenses, a light meter, sunshades, and rolls of film.

  Part 2

  * * *

  EXPERIENCE

  I thought, “Shit, there’s more to this photography than I thought.”

  —DAVID BAILEY

  Chapter 10

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  “ONE STOLEN FRAME”