Richard Avedon – The eye without lashes [08/11/2008]

He was one of the most sought-after 20th century photographers: he worked for Harper’s Bazaar for twenty years, spent twenty-five designing cover pages for Vogue, and twelve for The New Yorker and captured the reality of events and people of his time without a trace of sentimentality. From the glamorous world of fashion to the austerity of the struggling, lower middle classes of the American West, he devoted his talent to capturing flashes of truth.
He was a photographer who embodied renunciation, working from No, replacing colour with black and white and sharpening the focus on his models with neutral backgrounds.

Richard AVEDON is a monstre sacré of American photography and is being honoured (from July 1st to September 28) by the Jeu de Paume in Paris with the first retrospective in France since his death in 2004. His disappearance very quickly had an impact on the secondary market: his turnover at auction in 2005 was ten times that of the preceding year. His prints are essentially sold in the US (79% of transactions) and the United Kingdom (17%).
Avedon worked several times in Paris and revolutionised fashion photography by marrying contradictions to create a strange beauty. The print of Dovima in a Dior evening gown posing between two elephants from the Winter Circus in Paris (1955) is emblematic of this quality. He produced several prints of this subject at different times and in different sizes, and in its large format edition it was the first to fetch more than USD 100,000. Dovima subduing her elephants was sold for USD 150 000 dollars, in October 2005, a late reprint in 50 copies (Christie’s, 125.8 x 101.6 cm).

The works that are quickest at sending bids over USD 100,000 are those of stars and models in lascivious poses. The most expensive picture was one of the iconic Marilyn Monroe, a vintage print from 1957 which sold for USD 365,000 on April 7 2008 at Sotheby’s (39.7 x 39.1 cm). Collectors fought not only over the model’s aura but also for an original, unique print.
The going price for some subjects rose ten times over a decade even if they were printed in batches of 100 or 200. These are cult pictures in constant demand like the seductive Natasha Kinski shown with a snake coiled round her nude body. This went for USD 6,500 in 1998 (Beverly-Hills), then USD 9,000 dollars in 2000 (Sotheby’s NY), before fetching USD 75,000 dollars in 2008 (Christie’s NY).
These subjects were, however, only one aspect of his work. He photographed just as many personalities in full-lit mode as anonymous people in the shadows. The series that are well-worth looking at include: a psychiatric hospital in Louisiana in 1963, bodies mutilated by Napalm bombs in Saigon in 1971, underprivileged people in the American West between 1979 and 1984. The last, titled In the American West has 732 prints which are rarely found at auction. One of them, Richard Wheatcroft, Rancher, Jordan, Montana, a diptych measuring more than a metre, and one of four only, went for USD 160 000 dollars in April 2007 at Sotheby’s. This was the first time a picture from the series had broken through USD 100,000 and it was a sign of the recent interest shown by collectors in Avedon's committed humanism.