New Avedon Book: A Few Thoughts
Huff Post has posted my short review of “Something Personal,” a new book about the photographer Richard Avedon. First graf: ‘In the spring of 1993, I was summoned to meet the photographer Richard Avedon at his studio, a converted carriage house on New York’s Upper East Side. Then the cultural editor of The New Yorker, I had been asked by Tina Brown, the editor-in-chief, to help scare up subjects for Avedon, who the previous year had been named the first staff photographer in the magazine’s history. The task was slightly absurd, as Avedon, though nearing seventy, still had his antennae very much alert. If his professional enthusiasms were very public, his private ones were often hidden. A little like Calvin Klein and Gianni Versace, two of Avedon’s biggest clients in that era, the photographer’s intimate life with men was not fully out.’
