Ron Howard’s film about Richard Avedon lands on Netflix on November 11, with the one thing these films usually cannot get, full access to the archive.
Avedon, a feature documentary directed by Ron Howard, premiered at Cannes earlier this year and arrives on Netflix on Wednesday, November 11. It runs an hour and forty four minutes. It is a production of Imagine Documentaries and Fifth Season, made in association with the Richard Avedon Foundation, which is the detail that matters most, because it means the film had the run of his personal archive rather than the handful of images everybody has already seen.
Netflix describes never before seen stills, behind the lens footage and new interviews with his closest collaborators. Howard says he was drawn to Avedon not only for the pictures but for the humanity and curiosity behind them, which is the sort of thing directors say, though the access suggests the film has more to work with than sentiment.
Who he was, for anyone who only knows the name
Richard Avedon was born in New York in 1923 and worked for sixty years. He started at Harper’s Bazaar in 1944, moved to Vogue in 1965, and in 1992 became the first staff photographer the New Yorker ever had. He photographed Marilyn Monroe, the Beatles, Andy Warhol, presidents and generals, and he also photographed drifters, miners and slaughterhouse workers with exactly the same apparatus and exactly the same attention. He died in 2004.
His fashion work is the part most people picture, Dovima standing between two elephants in 1955 being the image that gets reproduced most. But the work that matters most to photographers is the portraiture, and the portraiture is almost entirely black and white.
In the American West
In 1979 the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth commissioned him to photograph the American West. He spent five years on it, photographed 762 people and exposed something like 17,000 sheets of 8 by 10 film. The method never varied. A sheet of white paper taped up in the shade, north light, no studio lighting, an 8 by 10 view camera on a tripod, and Avedon standing beside it rather than behind it, looking at the person rather than through the glass while he tripped the shutter.
What came out of it were enormous prints of people with nothing behind them at all. No landscape, no context, no explanation. Just a face, every pore of it, at a scale that makes a gallery wall uncomfortable. The work has been argued about ever since, with critics split on whether it is a profound act of attention or a cold one, and that argument is a large part of why it is still worth looking at forty years later.
What to watch for
Films about photographers usually turn into films about personalities, and the thing worth hoping for here is the working footage. Avedon’s method is the most instructive part of him. The white background is not a neutral choice, it is an aggressive one, because it removes every excuse a subject has and every bit of context a viewer might lean on. The large format negative means detail that holds at mural size. Standing beside the camera means the person is looking at a man rather than a lens, which is why his subjects look uneasy in a way that still reads as honest rather than staged.
For anyone working in monochrome portraiture, those three decisions are the whole lesson, and they cost nothing. A wall, daylight and attention. The equipment was never the point, which is a reasonable thing to remember when the film arrives and the archive gets opened in front of us on November 11.
Featured photograph from the documentary Avedon, courtesy of Netflix.