Groundbreaking photographer Richard Avedon dies

NEW YORK – Richard Avedon, the revolutionary photographer who redefined fashion photography as an art form while achieving critical acclaim through his stark black-and-white portraits of the powerful and celebrated, died Friday. He was 81.

Avedon suffered a brain hemorrhage last month while on assignment in San Antonio, Texas, for The New Yorker, taking pictures for a piece called “On Democracy.” He spent months on the project, shooting politicians, delegates and citizens from around the country.

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, said he plans to publish the work before the Nov. 2 election.

Avedon’s sensuous fashion work helped create the era of supermodels such as Naomi Campbell and Cindy Crawford. But Avedon went in another direction with his portrait work, shooting unsparing and often unflattering shots of subjects from Marilyn Monroe to Michael Moore.

As a Publishers Weekly review once noted, Avedon helped create the cachet of celebrity – if he took someone’s picture, they must be famous.

Prestigious institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., staged major Avedon retrospectives, and his list of honors stretched across more than 50 years. In 2003, he received a National Arts Award for lifetime achievement.

Among Avedon’s best-known work was “Nothing Personal,” a 1964 collection of unflattering photographs of affluent Americans.

His early career was fictionalized in the 1956 Hollywood musical “Funny Face,” starring Fred Astaire as the fashion photographer “Dick Avery.”

In the 1980s, Avedon took several photographs that were shocking for their time. Perhaps the best known was one in 1980 of Brooke Shields at age 15 striking a suggestive pose wearing skin-tight jeans for the Calvin Klein ad “Nothing Comes Between Me and My Calvins.”

“He could be very provocative,” said fashion historian Kennedy Fraser, a former fashion editor for The New Yorker. Recalling that European photographers were the first to work near-explicit sex and tabloid-like setups into their fashion work, she added, “I’m not sure he was a path-breaker, but he brought others’ ideas into the American mainstream.”