Working the Room. Geoff Dyer

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       Richard Avedon

      In 1960 Richard Avedon photographed the poet W. H. Auden on St. Mark’s Place, New York, in the middle of a snowstorm. A few passers-by and buildings are visible to the left of the frame but the blizzard is in the process of freezing Auden in the midst of what, in the US, is termed ‘a white-out’. Avedon had by then already patented his signature approach to portraiture, so it is tempting to see this picture as a God-given endorsement of his habit of isolating people against a sheer expanse of white, as evidence that his famously severe technique is less a denial of naturalism than its apotheosis.

      Auden is shown full-length, bundled up in something that seems a cross between an old-fashioned English duffle coat and a prototype of the American anorak. Avedon, in this image, keeps his distance. More usually his sitters (who are rarely permitted the luxury of a seat) are subjected to a visual interrogation that quite literally flies in the face of Auden’s ideas of good photographic manners:

      It is very rude to take close-ups and, except

      when enraged, we don’t:

      lovers, approaching to kiss,

      instinctively shut their eyes before their faces

      can be reduced to

      anatomical data.

      Avedon’s critics allege that this is what he did consistently and deliberately: reduced faces to anatomical data. At the very least, as Truman Capote happily observed, Avedon was interested in ‘the mere condition of a face’. If this had the quality of disinterested inquiry others claimed that his impulses were crueller, more manipulative – an opinion that Avedon occasionally confirmed. In 1957 he caught the Duke and Duchess of Windsor recoiling from the world as if it were a perfectly bloody little place. According to Diane Arbus this result was achieved by Avedon explaining that on the way to the shoot his taxi ran over a dog. As the Windsors flinched with sympathetic horror he clicked the shutter.

      It has also been suggested that the photographs of crumpled, ageing faces were in some way Avedon’s revenge on the fashion and glamour business in which he made his name, an explicit rebuke to the claim that his work was all surface and no depth. This opposition cannot long be sustained. As Avedon rightly insisted, ‘The surface is all you’ve got. You can only get beyond the surface by working with the surface.’ And the movement between the two activities, between fashion and portraiture was, in any case, constant and mutually informing.

      A little detour, via French street photography, will show how.

      Jacques Henri Lartigue’s photographs have exactly the unposed, felicitous spontaneity that made Robert Doisneau’s later image of a Parisian couple kissing immediately appealing. As is now well known, ‘The Kiss’ was deliberately choreographed by the photographer. In this transition, from the happy accidents of Lartigue to the premeditated charm of Doisneau, we can see one of the two contradictory but complementary impulses that have also animated the history of fashion photography. The unposed becomes the template for a pose; the miracle of the unguarded moment is always being turned into a style and a commodity.

      Evidence of the other, contrary, movement is also found throughout the history of fashion photography. An established way of photographing models or clothes becomes too artificial, too static, too posed. Then someone comes along and, through a combination of ambition, daring and vision, injects an element of spontaneity, naturalness. Take any of the famous names in the history of fashion photography and the chances are you will discover that they once offered a liberating alternative to the staid, that they wanted ‘to get away from the piss elegance of it all’ (not Bailey, Beaton!) or felt like ‘a street savage surrounded by sophisticates’ (Irving Penn!). The peculiar twist of fashion photography is that this ‘naturalness’ is achieved by – or immediately creates the conditions for – further contrivance. It cannot be otherwise, for the effect the images are ultimately intended to create (a willingness, desire or aspiration to purchase the stuff the models are wearing) precedes and has priority over what is randomly discovered.

      This is why any discussion of fashion photography comes, inevitably, back to Avedon, who tirelessly and inventively raised the bar of contrived naturalness. Far from negating this practice his portraits are the most extreme expression of contriving a way of stripping away contrivances. One sees this nakedly in Laura Wilson’s photographs of Avedon at work on the portraits of drifters and workers collected in In the American West: lights, assistants and blank white paper cut off his subjects from their natural habitat more completely than the bars of a zoo. Thus confined they are granted an anonymous kind of celebrity, ostensibly because Avedon was a photographer with an instantly recognisable style; more subtly, because the cumulative effect of ruthless stripping away is not simply to lay bare. Revelation is also a means of generation.

      What, then, is being generated?

      In the work of David Octavius Hill and his contemporaries, Walter Benjamin was struck by the way that ‘light struggles out of darkness’. Benjamin went on to describe how, from about 1850 to 1880, the client was confronted with a ‘a technician of the latest school’ whereas the photographer was confronted by a ‘member of a rising class equipped with an aura that had seeped into the very folds of the man’s frock coat or floppy cravat’. Benjamin was adamant that the aura was not simply the product of primitive technology. Rather, in that early period, subject and technique were ‘exactly congruent’. This lasted only a short while, for ‘soon advances in optics made instruments available that put darkness entirely to flight and recorded appearances as faithfully as any mirror’. As a result the aura was ‘banished from the picture with the rout of darkness through faster and faster lenses’.

      With Avedon – ‘that wonderful, terrible mirror’, as Cocteau called him – the wheel came full circle. Absolute whiteness took the place of the darkness against which the light had struggled to emerge. And in this renewed and reversed congruence of subject and technique, a new aura and order emerged, one based on the reciprocity of fame. A famous photographer takes pictures of famous people (people whose aura has seeped into their cravats – or shirts, or dresses – and whose aura, СКАЧАТЬ