|
I first met Richard Avedon in the early 1970s, after I’d called to interview him for a cover story for New York magazine on the state of fashion photography. He was slightly wary on the phone, then said after a few minutes, "You sound like a nice person. Come to the studio and we'll talk."
 As a journalist, I’d already met quite a few celebrities and made it a point not to be overly impressed. But the idea of meeting Avedon, whose pictures I’d been seeing in my mother’s Harper’s Bazaars since I’d been about 10, had me star-struck. We sat down and talked for an hour or so in his rather spare apartment above his East 75th Street studio, and the photographer, a slender, energetic man with an enviable mane of dark hair, gave me a crash course in the history of fashion photography. Avedon, always competitive, was not above a bit of mischief. Sensing, no doubt, that I didn’t know very much, he mentioned that his great contemporary Irving Penn was “semi-retired, living out on Long Island.” Penn was, of course, at the height of his powers, and is still making extraordinary photographs at the age of 87. But the two men approached their work so differently – Penn cool and cerebral and carefully considered, Avedon charming and and physical and seemingly spontaneous, a kind of Balanchine choreographing his high energy fashion shoots – that it’s at least possible that Avedon wasn’t misleading me but simply interpreted the other man’s style as a form of half-time work.
"On the spur of the moment I mentioned that my wife and I were leaving to spend the summer on a small Greek island where we owned a house, and that if he found himself “in the neighborhood,” he should come and visit. A month or so later a cable arrived on the island from Paris, where Avedon had been shooting the fall collections: “Hope you meant it. I’m on my way."
When the piece appeared, Avedon called me to say he thought it was good, and thanked me for getting his story right. Calls like this had not been common in my career up to that point (nor have they been since). On the spur of the moment I mentioned that my wife and I were leaving to spend the summer on a small Greek island where we owned a house, and that if he found himself “in the neighborhood,” he should come and visit. A month or so later a cable arrived on the island from Paris, where Avedon had been shooting the fall collections: “Hope you meant it. I’m on my way. Dick A.”
I had meant it, of course, but I was both surprised and delighted that the famous Avedon was coming. We had friends staying with us at the time, an American painter and his girlfriend. Suddenly, the four of us suddenly felt we’d better get the place, and ourselves, prepared for a man heading our way from the dreamy dens of Parisian haute couture. No country home in a Jane Austen novel was ever more carefully prepared for an important visitor.
We needn’t have worried. Dick A. arrived on the rusty island ferry just after midnight, without assistants or entourage, carrying one small suitcase. There was nothing glamorous about the moment, though to us our visitor was by definition glamorous and perhaps he thought of people who spent much of their lives on a small Greek island had at least the potential for glamour. My wife and I and our friends were tan and fit from long daily swims, and Avedon was small, slender and urban-pale. Yet somehow he seemed the more vigorous. Perhaps it was the leftover electricity of a high-wire week of fashion shows. What I came to realize as I got to know him better, however, was that he was someone who seemed made of pure energy. He was always larger than life, but so unaware of this that he never became a caricature of himself.
"He seemed, at last, to be growing old, but his magnetism was undiminished."
 The next morning, like an explorer bringing mirrors and wind-up toys to amaze Stone Age natives, Avedon took out of his bag a brand new, never-before-seen SX-70 camera given to him by Polaroid. He showed us several self-portraits he’d made in an Athens hotel (to this day I’m angry at myself that I didn’t tuck one away in order to have a unique Avedon). The man in the small color pictures, posing against the seamless of a whitewashed wall, was in some way different than the man showing the pictures. As in all the self-portraits I’ve ever seen of him since, Avedon seemed intentionally to have suppressed his abundant energy in front of the lens, as if confirming the primitive suspicion that the camera is a stealer of souls. Filling the air with the antic whirr of the SX-70, the man who had made portraits of presidents and dukes and movie stars took pictures of us. We were giddy with the flattery. I often wonder what happened to those portraits of brown, happy people in their early thirties so many years ago.
I can’t remember Avedon regaling us with stories of the Parisian scene, though after a couple of months on our starkly simple island we would have devoured them. Instead, he seemed enormously curious about us – what we did, how we’d found our way to the place, what we were reading, anything and everything. Again, we were enormously flattered. He made each of us believe that there was as much to be learned from us as from Henry Kissinger or Francis Bacon or Charlie Chaplin. No surprise to me, now, that he could charm anyone into surrendering to him and his revealing lens. He had with him the galley of a Joseph Brodkey story soon to appear in the New Yorker, and gave it to me to read, as if Brodkey’s tormented Manhattan voice might bring a touch of that island’s reality to my island’s fantasy. Avedon, a classic intellectual autodidact who had co-edited his high school paper in the Bronx with James Baldwin, was a great fan of the kind of labyrinthine angst Brodkey represented. It may have been a tuning fork for his own existential tremors, as was Diane Arbus’s work – and I suspect he felt we could use a whiff of entropy to balance our too-easy ecstasy.
For a couple of days, with Dick in tow (if he could ever actually be said to be “in tow”) we did what we normally did: went to the sea, swam, spearfished, took the catch to a small taverna to be grilled for lunch, drank some retsina, talked, then climbed the hill back to the monastery town to our house and went off to our rooms for a siesta. But this pleasant life, a life of some work but mostly play, soon had our guest restless and bored. On the third morning he left the house for a walk and returned a couple of hours later. “Tomorrow night’s the full moon,” he said. “We’re going to go up to the highest place on the island with food and musicians and have a celebration.”
This was a terrific idea, I told him, but not something we’d be able to pull off on such short notice. We’d never be able to make the arrangements, or get donkeys for the steep trip up to the top of Prophet Elijah (the name for this high point and those of most Greek islands), or talk our local musicians – accustomed to the smoky comforts of tavernas – into making a rocky trek by moonlight and flashlight. My dismissal of this ambitious plan, the naïve concept of someone fresh from the conveniences of New York and Paris, was partly a product of laziness; I was the only one in our house who spoke Greek and would thus have to round up all the needed resources and cajole a reluctant “support staff.”
I thought about the photographer’s charmed cajolery on the island, and knew that there was no sitter, be it model or maestro, who could resist him.
“Oh, don’t worry,” Avedon said. “It’s all taken care of. The donkeys will be here around six.”
I was stunned. Here was someone who spoke not a word of Greek, who had come to a place entirely new to him only a couple days before. Yet somehow he had put together an adventure that would have daunted those of us who had lived on the island for years. Avedon seemed to think it was the most natural thing in the world to have raised a small army of islanders to help us create a midsummer night’s dream.
Late in the afternoon, the braying of donkeys announced that our transportation had arrived. On their backs they carried bread, cheese, dried octopus, stuffed grape leaves, figs, and bottles of wine. One tiny burro carried the instruments of our three musicians. Dick leapt around, checking everything, urging us to get going so we could watch the sun set behind the islands to the west. I won’t describe in detail the amazing evening that followed, except to say that it might have been lifted right out of a Fellini film, and was unforgettable for all of us. Avedon had come to our island and instantly, magically made it his. Like Prospero in “The Tempest,” he had conjured a transformation in our lives simply because he felt we no longer realized how lucky we were. With his wonderful, willful way of focusing our attention, he had returned to us our brave new world. I can’t imagine anyone else capable of doing that, or caring enough to take the trouble.
After that one week during one summer in Greece, I got to know Richard Avedon as a friend; as a writer and critic I wrote often about him and his work. Whenever I saw a new picture—whether it was a high-energy fashion image, disturbing work such as that of “In the American West,” or some theatrical New Yorker portrait like the eye-popping picture of Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, made shortly before Avedon’s death—I thought about the photographer’s charmed cajolery on the island, and knew that there was no sitter, be it model or maestro, who could resist him.
“Now my charms are all o’erthrown…”
Many years ago we had a falling out over something I wrote. In the time between then and now, we became friends again, though after I moved to California we only saw one another occasionally, often when he came west for an opening of a show at the Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco or I went east to see his latest exhibition. Our last encounter was, for me, pure serendipity. I was walking in Central Park, shortly after leaving The Metropolitan Museum where I’d been looking at several rooms full of his photographs, when I saw him walking toward me with a friend. He seemed, at last, to be growing old, but his magnetism was undiminished. We sat on a bench for 15 minutes and reminisced. About a time now long ago, on an island far away.
When I heard of my friend’s death, at 81, while working, I thought of a line from Prospero’s final soliloquy: “Now my charms are all o’erthrown…” And I realized, happily, that we have a great life’s work to keep that from ever applying to Richard Avedon.
Owen Edwards is a contributing editor to American Photo.
|
