Richard Avedon
Richard Avedon's fashion and portrait photographs helped define America's image of style, beauty and culture for the last half-century.
In 1962 Eugene Ostroff, a curator at the Smithsonian Institution, offered Mr. A vedon his first museum exhibition. He seized the offer as a chance to experiment with presenting his pictures outside the pages of a book or magazine, insisting on an installation in which his prints overlapped and filled every inch of space on the walls. By the 1970's Mr. Avedon was becoming increasingly conscious of the recognition of photography in the art world, and of his own place in the artistic traditions of the medium. He served as the editor of the book "Diary of a Century: Photographs by Jacques-Henri Lartigue" (1970), helping to bring greater acclaim to a photographer who has since been recognized as one of the most original camera artists of the last century. In 1974 his searing portrait series of his terminally ill father was exhibited at the Museum of Modem Art in New York, and in 1975 a large exhibition of his portraits was presented at the Marlborough Gallery. The two shows catapulted his work into the center of the growing discussion about photography's power as a contemporary art form.