Richard Avedon

Richard Avedon was an American fashion and portrait photographer. He worked for Harper's Bazaar, Vogue and Elle specializing in capturing movement in still pictures of fashion, theater and dance.

During a career that spanned nearly sixty years, Richard Avedon’s reportage, portraiture, and fashion work dissolved the lines between photographic genres and covered an enormous breadth of subjects. By capturing American ideals of fashion, portraiture, and beauty in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, he helped cement photography’s status as a legitimate contemporary art form. While the portraiture of his peers tends to focus on composed and isolated moments, Avedon’s stark lighting draws the viewer to the power of the subject’s expression, which often suggests concealed layers to their personalities.