Richard Avedon
Richard Avedon's long career reveals an abundance of serendipity but few accidents. He possesses the rare ability to dream, to realize his dreams, then to up the ante and imagine where his talent might next take him. Usually, he gets there. In a way few artists ever manage, he directs and edits his accomplishments-an auteur's auteur. This process has intensified during the past few years as he entered his eighth decade and undertook what may well be the most ambitious individual photographic project in the medium's history-a series of big books for Random House and Eastman Kodak tracing his own life, his career, the events of the 1960s, and his considerable wisdom about the craft of photography. The first book in the series, An Autobiography, came out last October amid astonishing media fan" fare. Intensely personal and conceptually challenging, the $100 volume nonetheless sold out its first printing before the end of the year.