“Avedon’s Eye,” by Dodie Kazanjian, was originally published in the February 1994 issue of Vogue.
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Richard Avedon made four trips to Stockholm a few years ago to see Ingmar Bergman’s production of Long Day’s Journey into Night, in Swedish. He saw it seven times. “There’s no movie I could see seven times, but when a great living performance captures me, I could go every night, forever . . . . At the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm, when you go upstairs for coffee during intermission, there’s a place on the ceiling where they have the masks of comedy and tragedy—and they’re both tragedy! Because you’re in Sweden. So it’s the perfect place for me, obviously.”
There’s some irony here but also a valid point. Theater is the guiding metaphor in Richard Avedon’s life, as well as his work. An element of drama gets into everything he does, and the last few months have certainly brought him center stage. The most famous American photographer of our time has been up to his ears in publicity (and controversy) over his recently published book of photographs—which he calls An Autobiography—and over the major retrospective of his work that opens on March 24 at the Whitney Museum.
