‘Darkness and Light’ Gives a Snapshot of Avedon’s Life
Why is it that once commercial photographers or illustrators get really rich and famous, they suddenly start thinking about being regarded as fine artists instead? Commercial art is seen as somehow illegitimate or tainted, like an unmentionable sow’s ear in desperate need of silk-purse transformation.
Richard Avedon is a notorious example of the phenomenon--one of the greatest fashion photographers ever, responsible for an industrywide overhaul in how modern fashionability would henceforth be represented, who in recent decades has noisily insisted on “upgrading” his stature to Artist.
Tonight’s installment of “American Masters” on KCET-TV Channel 28 dances around that beribboned maypole once again, eliciting tangled opinions on whether his photographs are “really” art and, if so, on just how good they are.
Apparently it has not occurred to executive producer Susan Lacy that a far more revealing question might be: Why does Avedon even care about that overweening distinction? What does such myopic yearning say about who he is, how he thinks and how he works?
“Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light” is good at laying out Avedon’s professional narrative, from his famous emergence at Harper’s Bazaar during the heyday of Alexy Brodavitch and Carmel Snow in the 1950s to his unprecedented million-dollar jump to Vogue and beyond. But the 90-minute program is weak on personal biography and weaker still on addressing the photographer’s work. Whenever talk turns to art, be prepared for a fiesta of cliches.
Before Avedon, the standard look of fashion photography was characterized by artful formal posing. His great achievement at Harper’s was to banish such peacockery to the dustbin. Out went the model as statue, in came the model as performer. Clothing became a costume worn for a theatricalized media event, enacted by the model and directed by the photographer. Avedon was auteur.
Artistically speaking, bad photographs leave you bored, while good photographs make you want to make up stories about what you’re seeing in the picture. By contrast, Avedon’s photographs make you hunt for copy: You just know there’s a story attached, and you’re curious to find out what it is.
This is one hallmark of great advertising photography, and it describes Avedon’s extraordinary fashion work as much as it does the more personal--and therefore more banal--pictures that he likes to regard as Art.
“Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light” reaffirms, as if such were needed, its subject’s preeminent postwar stature as a fashion photographer. If only the program had been content to insist that nothing whatever is wrong with that.
* “Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light” airs at 9 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.
