Richard Avedon said of his photography: "A photographic portrait
is a picture of someone who knows he's being photographed and what
he does with this knowledge is as much a part of the photograph as
what he's wearing or how he looks."
• Born in New York on 15 May 1923, Richard Avedon was in
possession of a Kodak Box Brownie camera by the age of 12
• Having studied philosophy at Columbia University in the late
Thirties, Avedon went on to study photography under Alexey
Brodovitch at the Design Laboratory of the New School of Social
Research
• Richard Avedon shot the Paris collections for almost 40 years,
and was staff photographer for Vogue from 1966 until
1990
• Richard Avedon became the first ever staff photographer for
The New Yorker in 1992, at the age of 69
From the start of his career, Richard Avedon's name became
synonymous with fashion as well as portraiture. He photographed
everyone from Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton to Marilyn Monroe,
Dorothy Parker and the Duchess of Windsor as well as a lot of
"unknown" people. Known for bringing the fashion models of the day,
including Suzy Parker and Sunny Harnett, to life, Richard Avedon
injected a previously unseen vibrancy into the medium of fashion
photography.
Richard Avedon married twice and has a son. Perhaps the most
poignant set of photographs Avedon ever produced were those of his
dying father. He died in 2004 of a brain haemorrage.
The Richard Avedon Foundation
25 West 53rd Street, New York 10019
Tel: +1 212 581 5040
Fax: +1 212 581 5058
www.richardavedon.com