spotlight
Every Picture Tells a Story
The Amazing
Photography of
Rich
AR
d
Av
E
don
by bill biss
San Diegans are in for a rare and stunning treat as the famed photographer
Richard Avedon’s “Portraits of Power” are currently on exhibit in our San Diego
Museum of Art. After a showing in Washington D.C. which ended this past Janu-
ary, the San Diego show is the only stop now for “Portraits of Power” in the United
States. The San Diego Museum of Art garnered this privilege. Those who love
The Generals of the Daughters of the American Revolution, DAR Convention, Mayflower Hotel, Washington, D.C.,
photography and history should not miss the chance to spend a few hours in the
October 15, 1963.© 2009 The Richard Avedon Foundation
company and genius of Richard Avedon’s work.
For most people, when you say the name Richard Avedon, their minds go to the
acclaimed fashion and celebrity portraits he had created over the years. What is so
unique about “Portraits of Power” is that it exposes a whole other side to the artist.
His knowledge and historical perspective is showcased in several series of photos
and offers a masterful glimpse at the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the
notorious Chicago Seven of 1968, the movers and shakers of Washington in 1976
and the people who were in the political arena one way or another in 2004. Sadly,
Richard Avedon passed away in 2004 before completing his final “Democracy”
photo essay for The New Yorker. The 2004 photos he took present some of his final
work in this exhibit of “Portraits of Power.” To learn more about the show and the
man himself, The Rage Monthly spoke with Paul Roth, the curator of photography
and media arts at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. who oversaw
and organized this collection of more than 150 photos that is now proudly on
display at The San Diego Museum of Art through September 6.
Richard Avedon referred to his portraits as “to lay the ghost.” Paul Roth elabo-
rates on this by explaining, “Avedon would often say, “to lay the ghost.” What he
meant by that is that in photography, you’re taking a slice of time and the image
of a person. The pretext was that in making a photograph of somebody is like you
are slicing a little piece off of an anthropological study… taking a cross section of
a large bug and then taking it and putting it between two slides under a micro-
scope. That’s the idea and he’s doing that to somebody while they’re alive. Then,
keeping and preserving the ghost of their image, long after they pass away. So his
expression was “I lay the ghost.” That’s just wonderful imagery to me.
One series of photos on display in “Portraits of Power” is called “Nothing Per-
sonal.” The photos were in a book that Richard Avedon created in 1964 with noted
author James Baldwin who wrote an essay about the rights of black people in
America. The imagery of African Americans juxtaposed next to white political
Julian Bond and members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Atlanta, Georgia, March 23,
1963. © 2009 The Richard Avedon Foundation
48 RAGE monthly | July 2009
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