Photographer Richard Avedon with a more than six-decade-long career produced innovative and
delightful work in fashion as well as incisive and captivating portraits. Over the course of
his lifetime he worked with a number of models and a wide range of portrait subjects creating
a powerful body of pictures that allow his viewers to study the likenesses of actors ballet
dancers celebrities civil rights activists heads of state inventors musicians visual
artists and writers. Avedon offers viewers the opportunity to study faces without crossing any
socially imposed boundaries about staring too long he encourages viewers to think about the
people before them the lives they have lived their private personalities and public personas
their struggles accomplishments disappointments and joys. Richard Avedon. Relationships
presents a selection of 100 iconic fashion photographs and portraits from the extensive
collection at the Center for Creative Photography to delve into his approach to photographing
people. Avedon¿s combination of talent and skill technical proficiency and attuning to his
individual subjects allowed him to make portraits that are riveting presentations of the
people he photographed. Indeed he achieved mastery of the portraiture form. Avedon had the
opportunity to photograph a number of his portrait subjects on more than one occasion. Within
the catalogue it is possible to see painter Jasper Johns in 1965 and 1976 novelist Carson
McCullers in 1956 and 1958 the Beatles Andy Warhol Marilyn Monroe and poet Allen Ginsberg in
1963 and 1970. Perhaps the most dramatic and powerful example of Avedon¿s ongoing photographic
relationship is that with his friend and collaborator Truman Capote.
