
          Avedon's West
          By Ponder, ArtArt Ponder
          Vol. 9, No. 5, 1987, pp. 30-31
          
          Richard Avedon is generally known as a fashion photographer, the
man who creates the "idealized," sexist icons for the covers of such
magazines as Vogue and Self. Others may know him as a contributor to
Rolling Stone or the photographer who turned his large format camera
on the influential and powerful, making revealing portraits of
numerous "movers and shakers," George Wallace, Ronald Reagan and Jimmy
Carter among the herd. His most recent effort, however, is in sharp
contrast to those earlier identities. In "In The American West," a
traveling exhibition recently on view at the High Museum in Atlanta,
he takes as his subject not Vogue stereotypes, but the dispossessed,
the drifting, the working class, the "ordinary people" of an American
region. He does so in such a way as to startle nearly any viewer, and,
in the end, make an ambiguous comment about the West, a comment devoid
of humanity and thirsting for understanding.
          In 1979 Avedon began what developed into a five-year project, in
which he attempted to, as he says in the foreword to his book In
The American West, photograph "the men and women who work at
hard, uncelebrated jobs, the people who are often ignored and
overlooked." Toward this end, Avedon roamed the West, visiting events
and places such as county fairs, rodeos, coal mines, and slaughter
houses, looking for faces and bodies that would serve his vision of
the West. For Avedon, this is a process akin to auditioning actors for
a play or film, though here potential actors have no idea they are
under consideration. After selecting a person, he and his crew of
three or four assistants would erect a piece of large white backdrop
paper, always in the shade to give flat, even, light to all his
photographs, and position the subject for his or her portrait. Using
an 8x10 view camera, capable of rendering the most minute details with
clarity, Avedon would make his picture. About these subjects and the
subsequent results, Avedon has said: "These disciplines, these
strategies, this silent theatre attempt to achieve an illusion: that
everything embodied in the photography simply happened, that the
person in the portrait was always there, was never encouraged to hide
his hands, and in the end was not even in the presence of a
photographer."
          Such could not be further from the truth, for all of Avedon's
pictures radiate with the presence of the photographer nearly as much
as the subjects themselves. Like the portrait "Gordon Stevenson,
drifter, Interstate 90, Butte, Montana, 8/25/79,n all of Avedon's
subjects float in negative white space, rooted to nothing but perhaps
the edge of the frame, stripped of place and context, able to speak
only through their physical appearance.
          In Avedon's view of the West no one is given the dignity to be
viewed in their personal landscape. No one is seen in relation to
place. For students of Southern culture, this resonates with
exploitation, as Southerners have long been characterized as being
dependent upon a relationship to place, or in Eudora Welty's overused
notion, to have "a sense of place." Who would not look alienated, who
would not look dispossessed when asked to stand rootless against
seamless white paper? What would we think of Lewis Hine's photograph
of a young spinner in the Roanoke Cotton Mill if Hine pictured her in
an empty white space rather than with the spinning machine she saw too
much of? When pressed by critics concerned with the perceived
exploitative approach, Avedon invariably hides behind the artist's
veil. In a recent interview for Atlanta Art Papers, he
quipped: "...let's assume that it's correct that I take advantage
of people. What has that got to do with the business of an artist?
What difference does it make if I am a good or a bad man? We are
talking about the works of art which will live long after I'm
gone....But are the photographs true to the human condition? And has
damage been done?" He asks his own question and his exhibition
answers with a profound "yes," when we understand that he is offering
a misinformed, distorted and exploitative vision of an American region
that, by the nature of its circulation and hype, influences the views
and opinions of many.
          ONE OBSERVER OF THE exhibition commented that "many look as
though Avedon had stormed their homes and forced them up against the
white seamless backdrop paper, their pants unbuttoned, hair
disheveled, and their demeanor reflecting utter resignation before
this master of control. Others seemed to have been dragged from their
jobs..." (Spot, Fall 1985). Avedon, however,
contends that with portraiture "the surface is all you've got. You
can only get beyond the surface by working with the surface." This
leads him to abstract all his subjects in a white background. In
Avedon's portrait of the West there are no causes for dispossession
and despair, simply dispossession and despair.
          The show at the High Museum was sponsored in part by Rich's,
Atlanta's large department store chain; shows in other cities were
also underwritten by department stores, reflecting the high regard
bestowed upon Avedon by the corporate fashion machine. At the grand
gala opening in Atlanta, with Avedon in attendance, the museum patrons
and art aficionados wandered amidst the larger-than-life portraits of
drifters, miners and such, facing the working class of another region
in a way they may never have observed folks of similar plight and
occupation in the South. That Avedon's work forces viewers, some
reluctant ones, to look into the eyes of victims in America is one of
the powerful triumphs of the exhibition. One Atlanta
Journal-Constitution writer overheard a shocked Atlanta
matron responding to the show: "I know Jesus says you are supposed
to love everyone, but I just can't. I just can't. I can't love dirty
people or fat people."
          A VIEW OF THE AVEDON show (or the book) is like viewing the
collection of a well-traveled entomologist; we see many types, all
recorded by the collector in a similar fashion, but we know nothing of
any of them except their name and where they were found. Like a
collection of insects, Avedon's collection of faces and occupations
from the West are clear, sharp and well-presented, but without the
slightest bit of humanity. In a public lecture in Boston earlier this
year, he explained his right to photograph people however he wants:
"To say it in the toughest way possible, and the most unpleasant
way, what rights do Cezanne's apples have to tell Cezanne how to paint
them." Avedon knows no difference between the inanimate and the
animate. Years of fashion photography have conditioned him to only be
interested in the surface and the form, but not the person or the
life. In an Avedon session, he and the camera are the animate forms
and whoever the subject--factory worker, drifter, rancher--are
inanimate forms to be directed, arranged, and "framed" by the heavy
black lines of his large film format. Most tragically, his subjects
are silenced. Richard Bolton, a critic and an artist in Boston,
reflects on Avedon with sharp criticism: "His approach is
reminiscent of police photography--in the police photograph, one
cannot help but look like a criminal; the format itself communicates
guilt."
          Countless viewers of the Avedon show, unaware of exactly how they
feel about his work, offer such gut reactions as "powerful," "moving,"
and "disturbing." The power of Avedon's work rests with the ability of
these large, voyeuristic images to awake horrors in the minds and
hearts of viewers. Not unlike the tabloid report of human suffering or
catastrophe, Avedon's work provokes shock and horror. The real
tragedy, however, is that the provocation is an end in itself, and his
approach never gets beyond the surface he holds so dear, generating
not the least bit of understanding. Devoid of understanding and
compassion, his subjects are left to drift helplessly and silently,
with no voice to offer us their sagas of life and work.
          
            Art Ponder is a drifter and a sometimes contributor to
Southern Changes who is currently stationed in
Atlanta.
          
        