ART AND THE FASHION PHOTOGRAPHS OF RICHARD AVEDON

“It’s not a picture of you; it’s a picture of me.” — Richard Avedon

The body of work that an artist leaves behind can be a collection of objects or sounds that reflect the pieces of the world that they absorbed and that absorbed them. Precisely what that world was for each artist can be challenging to decipher. But not always. For one thing, there is the general culture within which an artist works. Music from the west is easily distinguished from Eastern music, as is a country-western ballad from Arabic hip-hop; Flamenco guitar is never confused with Mariachi music.

Visual artists working with mountains, woods, rivers, and deserts can be equally challenging to label by country, continent, or culture. These environments exist everywhere. Despite this, there are artists such as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, whose work unmistakably reflects a very small part of the world, Northern California, in which they lived. Iconic landmarks such as Half Dome and El Capitan, types of trees such as redwoods and manzanita, and uniquely western shorelines defined the region these two artists worked in along with the rest of the photographers making up the F-64 club in the early part of the last century. But here, the reverse might be true as well. It might be that their distinctive style and the public’s knowledge of where they worked making the region of the photographs recognizable.