Book of the Week

I’m starting to think of the Show as small-scale Salon, the politics and arts publication I started with a group of of other disgruntled dreamers back at the dawn of the dotcom era. Salon was originally conceived as a books journal, because we felt that even then books didn’t receive enough media attention, and that you could write about the entire universe by writing about books. The publishing industry keeps churning out books, but little effort or money is spent on marketing them — and as book sections disappear or downsize, only the top commercial titles get much attention.

So the Show will do its small public service each week by bringing your attention to the one book (some weeks maybe more) that avid readers should know about. You can help out by alerting fellow readers in the Comments Section below to books you’ve recently enjoyed.

Some of the books that we’ll be highlighting here are written by friends or authors I know. But I wouldn’t highlight them unless they were worthy of your attention. This is true of today’s Book of the Week. Author Philip Gefter is a friend of many years. I’ve been honored to know some very talented people. The author of this review, Karen Croft, is also a longtime friend — and colleague — of mine. I’m very pleased to welcome her today as a guest to the Show.

What Becomes a Legend Most

A Biography of Richard Avedon

By Philip Gefter

HarperCollins, 2020

Reviewed by Karen Croft

Once upon a time, not everyone took photographs all the time.

This book is about that time—following the Second World War—when great artists walked the streets and knew each other and were regularly featured in glossy magazines. The photography in those publications (Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue and many other coffee table galleries) were not just shiny—they were often a hybrid of editorial, commercial and art work that is hard to find today.

This kind of photography was not about “taking pictures” as much as “making” pictures—after much thought and preparation, and with painstaking technical and artistic skill in processing and editing them afterwards.

For students and lovers of photography, Philip Gefter (a writer and editor at the New York Times for more than 15 years) has composed a  biography of one of photography’s greatest practitioners. Gefter’s intelligent—often philosophically poetic—prose is delicious, making this a rich peek into a lost world.

But even if you think you don’t care about photography, this is a great American success story—complete with the angst and tragedy that implies—and perfect therapy for the harsh times through which we’re suffering today. It is encouraging, and calming somehow, to read about a time when hard work, years of experience and deep talent actually mattered—and was valued in America.

“What Becomes a Legend Most” (a reference to one of Avedon’s most famous ad campaigns) is a biography told through a series of sharply observed stories that portray a man who was in the right place at the right time, and knew how to take full advantage of it.

In 1955, Avedon was in Paris shooting for Harper’s Bazaar on the set of the movie “Trapeze” starring Burt Lancaster, which was filming at the Winter Circus. Avedon met the animal trainer, whom he cajoled into lining up elephants (!) as a backdrop for the lithe model Dovima (in YSL for Christian Dior of course). The logistics seem impossible and so does the perfection of the photos; they are as astounding as the inspiration to create them.

https://www.avedonfoundation.org/the-work  

Gefter allows us to wallow in the luxury of mid-century creativity, when mere mortals lived on the same planet with the likes of Francis Bacon, Truman Capote, Rudolf Nureyev, Leonard Bernstein, Diane Arbus, Andy Warhol, Charlie Chaplin, and the Beatles. Each vignette is more incredible than the last, as Avedon—who was regarded as an obsessively controlling studio photographer—moves through the world seemingly destined to run into the most photogenic and fascinating talents of his time. 

Avedon happened to be in Paris in 1961, when Nureyev defected from the Soviet Union. Asked to take publicity photos by a mutual friend, he agreed on the condition he could use them for Harper’s Bazaar. Avedon then banished everyone from a studio he had rented, and spent hours with the dancer, establishing a rapport based on mutual passion for the arts, and made pictures (there and later in New York) which are Michelangelo-like in their rapturous portrayal of the sculpted male body. 

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/10/08/wild-thing-2

Earlier that same year, Avedon was in Palm Beach to photograph  John F. Kennedy before his presidential inauguration. It was January 3, the day the US officially severed diplomatic relations with Cuba, and Kennedy was absorbed in communications with President Eisenhower’s office as Avedon set up his equipment. Secret Service men and stylists filled the room as JFK dictated memos to his secretary. Avedon later said of President-elect Kennedy: “When I’d ask him to look around, he’d stop dictating. But the moment I finished he’d start in where he left off. I’ve never seen such a display of mental control in my life.”

https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2011/01/03/132616931/kennedys

Avedon also took riskier trips. In 1971, he went to Vietnam to work on a project of his own. He called it “Hard Times,” saying, “All the people I have photographed in the last year and a half have been affected by Vietnam—as has all of American life. Vietnam is an extension—oh, unfortunately—of every sick thing in America.” He was dropped into the jungle to join a U.S. infantry platoon. Later, he waited seven weeks in steamy, decadent Saigon to shoot “The Mission Council”—the PR group for the war—which he considered his definitive portrait of U.S imperial power.

https://www.moma.org/collection/works/55502

Richard Avedon, a native New Yorker,  died in 2004 at 81,  after living through and chronicling one of the most fascinating epochs in history. As Gefter says of Avedon’s work: “It is a remarkable collective observation—a large artistic gesture across the American century.”

You can buy the book here