His work appeared in magazines from Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue to Life and Look. Between 19, he worked as a fashion photographer, revolutionizing the craft even as he honed his aesthetic. While the portraiture of his contemporaries focused on single moments or composed formal images, his stark lighting and minimalist white backdrops drew the viewer to the intimate, emotive power of the subject’s expression. Avedon’s distinct style of portrait photography is nothing short of iconic. The book features Avedon's extended projects on the civil rights debate in the early 1960s (published in 1964 in Nothing Personal) the American anti-war movement and the war in Vietnam from 1969-1971 portraits of the American power elite in 1976 for his groundbreaking Rolling Stone portfolio The Family 'Exiles: The Kennedy Court at the End of the American Century,' a retrospective homage to the Camelot generation, published in The New Yorker in 1993 and his final photo-essay, 'Democracy,' surveying the American state of mind during the politically-fractious time prior to the country's 2004 presidential election (published posthumously in The New Yorker in 2004).īy capturing American ideals of celebrity, fashion, and beauty in the 20th and early 21st centuries, Richard Avedon helped to establish photography as a contemporary art form.

Juxtaposing images of elite government, media, and labor officials with photographs of countercultural activists, writers and artists, and ordinary citizens caught up in national debates, it explores a five-decade taxonomy of politics and power by one of America's best-known artists. Richard Avedon photographed the faces of politics throughout his career and this book brings together his political portraits for the first time.

Richard avedon portraits of power