An autobiography richard avedon

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY, RICHARD AVEDON

PEOPLE AND IDEAS

Glenn O'Brien

An Autobiography, by Richard Avedon, published by Random House / Eastman Kodak Company, New York, 1993 ($100.00 hardcover).

When I first heard the title I thought it appropriate for a monumental career retrospective. But when I paged through the book, autobiography took on a new meaning.

This is autobiography in the sense that we speak of when, facing death, our lives are said to flash before our eyes. The montage of images presented here has that kind of power and sweep, that kind of peculiar paralogic, that kind of full emotional and experiential spectrum.

The sequence is at times dreamlike; images are juxtaposed with the skewed logic of the unconscious. A trivial similarity becomes a profoundly open-ended connection. Spreads of two pictures are instant equations. Pictures are linked by accidents of posture or gesture. Sometimes by a visual pun. Sometimes the images confront one another. Sometimes they flow with rhythm and alliteration and assonance. This is not a linear logic, but images yaw, pitch, and roll through the nexus of the conscious and unconscious, oscillating into unexpected epiphanies, eliciting troubling reverberation.

Hollywood director Lewis Milestone peers through pursed eyes, cold as a lizard, on a left-hand page, while a serpentine Hispanic carny leers perversely with snake eyes on the right. W. H. Auden stands in a snow flurry opposite a naked man covered with a swarm of bees. Poets and lovers Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky stand naked next to Henry Kissinger, Secretary of State, naked only in his ambition, as polar opposites of male sexiness. Simone, a model, is shown in kooky Correges slitted sunglasses opposite Vice President Nelson Rockefeller’s flesh-shrouded eyes. But through it all Richard Avedon never resorts to low irony. His pictures are never setups. They are perfect accidents of the sort that befall artists prepared to receive them. He never takes a cheap shot. When he takes a shot, it’s expensive.

Photographers have various degrees of interaction with their subjects. Some, like Winogrand, take only what is offered; some, like Weegee, covertly heighten reality; others, like most fashion photographers, arrange everything. Avedon employs all of those approaches, as a street photographer, a portraitist, and a fashion photographer. He’s a master both in catching the flow and in creating it. There is a strong thread running through the work, a signature of vision. It’s hard to pinpoint just what makes Avedon Avedon. Paging through An Autobiography I thought of the rhythm and blues song “Can I Get a Witness?”

Avedon is a compulsive witness. He wants to see everything and he does. In his photomat self-portrait he stares down the lens, rapt, hungry, fascinated, his big wideopen eyes like black holes that will let no matter escape. His portraits, like those of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor; Oscar Levant; the Generals of the Daughters of the American Revolution; and Gene Pitney, singer, with his manager, are all equally revelatory. Avedon is the perfect witness, able to elicit self-revelation from his subject.

The only text in this book is a brief introduction by Avedon. The book would have been purer, in a way, with no words to explain it. But the words are few and well chosen. The book is divided into three sections. Avedon says they “track the path of three crucial illusions” in his life. The first is the “illusion of laughter and a young man’s discovery of the fine line between hilarity and panic.” The second is about “the illusion of power.” The third is “about the loss of all illusions.”

The sections may seem somewhat arbitrary, but then, the artist is the arbiter. At first I was struck by the starkly and violently contrasted imagery of the third sec-

tion, which contains a much heavier dose of the grotesque than the rest of the book. Pictures of the semimummified dead from the catacombs of Palermo, and pictures of the lost-soul inmates of the East Louisiana State Hospital, and of disfigured Vietnamese napalm victims are found fairly early in the book, but later on these troubling presences increase in their frequency, abutting images of beauty and hope. It’s as if an emotional rheostat has been turned up. At first this turn away from glamour and journalism toward more weighty and difficult material struck me as a bit heavyhanded, but finally, it works. The hand is heavy but it’s graceful and true. It smacks you with transcendence. Hits you over the head with sublime dread. Avedon shows that there’s not much difference between a cliché and a cosmic truth.

The most distinctly biographical elements of the book are Avedon’s self-portraits and the portraits of his family: his father, whose startling portraits in the shadow of death are well known, his mother, his sister, his wives, children, and grandchildren. These are the simplest pictures in the book and, in a way, the most loaded, the most complex. We see Avedon’s DNA in these pictures. We catch a glimpse of him in the fast-eroding skull of his father and in the eyes of his grandchildren. We wonder about the wives, three of them. Their portraits are iconographie mysteries blending accident and intent, innocence and experience, hope and fate.

In the end, An Autobiography is a book of the dead, which—Egyptian, Tibetan or modern—is a text for bringing the soul back to life, one way or another. The Tibetan Book of the Dead describes the progress of the soul after life, before rebirth, as a struggle against illusions, which is also Avedon’s intention here. Perhaps this photographic book of the dead will help expedite the transit of souls through television limbos, image-overload bardo, and celebrity purgatories. In an age of unprecedented technology of illusion, Avedon’s self-reckoning reveals the power of one person’s vision, with control and finesse, to penetrate the illusory. As we witness a life, a very glamorous, intelligent, and thoroughly lived life, flashing before our eyes, we witness the process of witnessing, of seeing through what we see.