AVEDON CLOSE UP

An exceptional photographer lives on in two exhibitions and a new book. Julie Kavanagh remembers working with him ...

From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine

A portrait is a performance, Dick Avedon always said, and from 1992 to 1998, working with him on the New Yorker, I saw exactly what he meant.

Just to step onto the stage he created with a white paper cyclorama was an imperative for his sitters to perform. I watched Judi Dench will tears into her eyes for dramatic effect, Rufus Sewell assume the persona of a louche Hardyesque yokel, Nigel Hawthorne re-enact the madness of King George III... And all the while the maestro stood beside his 8x10 view camera, putting them at ease, and clicking the shutter at a character-revealing millisecond only he could divine.

It was Tina Brown's provocative appointment of Avedon as the first staff photographer of the venerable, text-driven New Yorker that had given me this chance. My role was to find subjects for him from the British cultural scene. Helen Mirren, Ian Bostridge, Thomas Adès and Tilda Swinton were among those who trekked out to the unprepossessing Clapham studio that he liked to use. They would chat over coffee and biscuits for ten minutes or so--a well-practised social ritual that flattered Avedon's sitters and relaxed them into giving him glimpses of the private self which his portraits would record.

Judi Dench The pianist Mitsuko Uchida describes these moments as "between two breaths...a moment of in-between actions, when people are not self-conscious". The turnover was very fast, and Avedon was never fazed except once, while waiting for John Gielgud to arrive. The theatre was Avedon's passion--he spent every evening in London at a different play--and he was also fundamentally a fan. Gielgud was a demi-god in his eyes, and I can still see him pacing the studio and continually glancing out of the window. He had been just as nervous, he said, before meeting the film-maker Jean Renoir, when admiration had rendered him almost speechless.

Mostly, however, it was the other way round. Here was a man whose subjects had included the artistic deities of the 20th century--Picasso, Stravinsky, the Beatles, Chaplin, Warhol, Auden, Bacon, Nureyev, Dylan... And for a performer, especially a young performer, to be photographed by Avedon was to be given the sense of having arrived. (I well remember the edgy excitement of Rufus Sewell, who brought along the "Clueless" starlet Alicia Silverstone, clearly intent on impressing her.) Not every actor liked being asked to perform for the camera, but I never saw anyone refuse, and the honour of the occasion could push Avedon's subjects way beyond the limits of normal behaviour. The intensely reticent Alan Bennett obligingly clambered up a tree in Hyde Park to pose in its highest branches--I think because Dick saw him as an owl.

There was only one sitter to whom Avedon's name can have meant nothing. Iris Murdoch, then in the late stages of Alzheimer's, arrived for a double portrait with her husband, the Oxford professor John Bayley, who had written for the magazine about his experience caring for her. Avedon's portraits are themselves visual biographies--"New Yorker profiles in miniature", his close friend and colleague Adam Gopnik calls them. Sometimes, as in his definitive study of Marilyn Monroe, his pictures augured the tragic consequences of a life. Dick had not yet read Bayley's memoir, the germ of his book "Iris" and the film of the same name, but the disparity between the couple's expressions-Murdoch's serene half-smile contrasted with Bayley's stern but solicitous gaze-sums up their situation with consummate simplicity. And yet there was one unforgettably poignant image which no still camera, not even Avedon's, could catch. After a few minutes posing beside her husband, Murdoch began making an agitated twisting motion with the fingers of her right hand: she was miming the turning of a car key in the ignition--she wanted to be taken home.

Iris Murdoch and John Bayley A number of these New Yorker images are included in "Richard Avedon Performance" (Abrams, October), a magnificent compilation of over 200 photographs, many of them unknown, with an introduction by John Lahr and reminiscences by Mitsuko Uchida, Mike Nichols and Twyla Tharp. The book is just one aspect of a global celebration of Avedon's work triggered by the recent settlement of his estate. Norma Stevens, executive director of the Richard Avedon Foundation, says that their mandate is to keep the impetus going--"not only with books and exhibitions, but starting up programmes for arts education, young interns and the digitalisation of 500,000 negatives".

This summer saw the first Avedon exhibition in France, a major retrospective at the Jeu de Paume curated by its dynamic Spanish director Marta Gili. Another exhibition, "Richard Avedon: Portraits of Power", opened in Washington in September, gathering 250 portraits from half a century of political life. Its subjects range from a satanic-looking Salman Rushdie, gulled by Avedon's wily manipulation of lighting into playing up his fatwa image, to the "Democracy" project Avedon was completing for the New Yorker in the last weeks of his life, a survey of America on the eve of the 2004 election. The last image is a colour photograph of Barack Obama, whose rise Avedon had foreseen the moment he heard his electrifying eloquence at the Democratic convention. It was, as Norma Stevens remarks, just another example of Avedon's intuition: "Dick came back to New York telling us, ‘This guy is it'."

Richard Avedon: Photographs 1946-2004 moved to Berlin in October, Amsterdam in February, and ends in San Francisco in October 2009. Richard Avedon: Portraits of Power is at the Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC, until January 25th.

Picture credit: © 2008 THE RICHARD AVEDON FOUNDATION
Richard Avedon, self-portrait, Provo, Utah, 1980 (top); Judi Dench, London, 1997; Iris Murdoch and her husband John Bayley, London, 1998

(Julie Kavanagh is a biographer of Nureyev and the former London editor of the New Yorker. Her last piece for Intelligent Life was about Angel Corella's new dance company)