Richard Avedon – Woman in the Mirror

I seek out a lot of photographic art books as my sources of inspiration and I simply adore looking at great photographs that are beautifully printed and presented in books by the best art publishers of our times.

Most of the books in my collection are from the classic photojournalists of the last century. I own ten or so Henri Cartier-Bresson volumes, three or four by Elliott Erwitt (including a signed copy of ‘Snaps’) and all of Garry Winogrand’s recent editions – including ‘Figments from the Real World’ – now worth almost 20 times what I paid in a London bookstore back in 2003.

The latest addition to the McBurney collection is Richard Avedon’s ‘Woman in the Mirror’.

The book is a fabulous look back at the women he photographed for over fifty years – a fascinating series of fashion photography from the fifties onwards and includes many great portraits of the women he encountered throughout his life.

Norma Stevens, executive director of the Avedon foundation, wrote in the book’s foreword about it’s title:
“It goes to the heart of what I believe intrigued Dick about photography – its ambiguity. Who is reflected in the mirror: the seer, the seen, or the unseen?”

Avedon burst onto the fashion scene in the 1940s, infusing his photographs with touches of realism and the fantastic. His images were among the first to replace the stiff poses of the past with energetic action scenes that commanded the pages of Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue magazines from the mid-’40s through to the 1980s.

Whilst he did work with professional models, his photographs were never boring, never static. His images were absolutely full of movement and I think that that’s what draws me to his work. Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m no lover of static images – a good photograph must have feeling, vitality and life. It absolutely should have movement.

Speaking of movement Avedon once said that:
“One of the most powerful things about photography is that it is a constant surprise. You don’t know what the fabric is going to do, what the hair is going to do and also you have to remember that when I photograph movement I have to anticipate – that by the time it’s happened it’s too late to photograph it. So there’s this terrific interchange between the moving figure and myself, that is like dancing.”

I love the idea of that – that even Avedon, the great constructor of the ‘stage managed’ photograph, still had to anticipate what was about to happen within the frame.

Anticipation obviously plays a big part in the capture of great photojournalistic wedding images. In fact, you could say that shooting journalistically at a wedding is one of the hardest things to do because you have to deal with changing lighting conditions, moving subject(s) and changing compositional challenges all without the benefit of pinning everything down in a controlled studio environment. And you have to do it all with split second timing.

‘Woman in the Mirror’ is fabulous to look at and I know I’ll spend many hours poring over it’s pages in the future. The black and white images are exquisitely printed and of course all of the women within the book are beautiful.

The best photographs in life should be just like Avedon’s – an intimate triangle – between subject, photographer and viewer.