Richard Avedon, whose fashion and portrait photographs helped define America’s image of style, beauty and culture for the last half-century, died on Saturday in San Antonio. The cause was complications of a cerebral hemorrhage suffered a week earlier. He was 81.
Avedon’s photographs are known for capturing the freedom, excitement and energy of fashion as it entered an era of transformation and popularization. He revolutionized the 20th-century art of fashion photography, and became such a name, that when he was in his 30’s, he was the inspiration for Dick Avery, the fashion photographer played by Fred Astaire in the 1957 film “Funny Face.”
Born in New York City on May 15, 1923, his father, Jacob Israel, a second-generation Russian-Jewish immigrant, was the proprietor of Avedon’s Fifth Avenue, a Manhattan clothing store. His mother, Anna Avedon, came from a family that owned a dress manufacturing business. As a boy, Richard Avedon avidly read fashion magazines and decorated the walls of his room with tear sheets of the fashion photographs he admired.
He spent a year at Columbia University before joining the Merchant Marine, which assigned him to the photo section, where he learned photography. He left in 1944 and he sought out Alexey Brodovitch, an influential designer and the art director of Harper’s Bazaar. Brodovitch and Avedon formed an immediate bond and, in 1945, Avedon’s photographs began appearing in Junior Bazaar and, a year later, in Bazaar itself. From 1946 to 1965 he was a staff photographer at Harper’s Bazaar and later at Vogue (1966-1970). His career also included the art world, showing his photographs at the Smithsonian Institution and the Whitney Museum of American Art. He also created advertising photos for clients like Revlon and Christian Dior. Most recently he worked for The New Yorker magazine, which hired him in 1992 as its first staff photographer.