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<\/p>\nIn an audio interview in \u201cAvedon,\u201d the Ron Howard-directed documentary, which premiered at this year\u2019s Cannes Film Festival and streams on Netflix, beginning Nov. 11, Richard Avedon is asked why he took up photography. \u201cI still can\u2019t type,\u201d he answers. \u201cI can\u2019t read my own handwriting. I don\u2019t think consecutively. I\u2019m anecdotal. I\u2019m instinctual. But I can see like a son of a bitch.\u201d<\/p>\n
The movie chronicles the famed photographer\u2019s life and 60-year career shooting not just icons of the fashion and film worlds but also mental institutions, the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. Avedon also focused extensively on the American West, which served as the setting for his 1985 portrait series of coal miners, oil field workers, ranchers, drifters and ordinary people that he considered his masterwork.<\/p>\n
Howard\u2019s documentary features interviews with fellow photographers, models, magazine editors, writers, former assistants and art dealers, including Larry Gagosian, who reminisces about meeting Avedon for the first time in New York in the mid-1970s. Gagosian later brought one of Avedon\u2019s exhibitions to the ArtCenter College of Design in 1976 and to Broxton Gallery, his first space in Westwood. He opened Gagosian a few years later, leading to a decades-long relationship with the photographer and more than a dozen shows at the gallery in the last 15 years.<\/p>\n
Gagosian\u2019s newest exhibition, opening Wednesday, is titled \u201cRichard Avedon: Hollywood.\u201d But the more than 120 featured images, spanning from 1947 to the year Avedon died in 2004, embrace all kinds of celebrities who represent Hollywood, not just as a place and an industry, but as a \u201cglobal concept\u201d and an \u201caspirational notion,\u201d said curator (and Avedon\u2019s daughter-in-law) Laura Avedon.<\/p>\n
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Elizabeth Taylor, cock feathers by Anello of Emme, in New York on July 1, 1964. <\/p>\n
(Richard Avedon \/ Richard Avedon Foundation)<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you look at each individual portrait in the exhibition, every single one of them can be connected back to Hollywood in some way,\u201d said Laura Avedon, who is also one of the movie\u2019s executive producers. \u201cI\u2019m not just looking at Hollywood as film people. That would be a very narrow view from my perspective. I\u2019m looking at Hollywood as an idea, a particularly American idea that encompasses so much of America, fame, money, creativity, talent and vision.\u201d<\/p>\n
Laura Avedon conceived of the show while Howard\u2019s Imagine Entertainment scoured the Richard Avedon Foundation\u2019s archive of approximately 500,000 images for use in the film.<\/p>\n
Laura Avedon said that working with a Hollywood production company presented a unique opportunity., \u201cI became very interested in what sort of Hollywood threads and connections could be discovered. So I started following the threads to see where they lead. I wanted to see whose stories are worth telling and who drives the actual narrative content of Hollywood.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Steven Spielberg, Los Angeles, February 1994. <\/p>\n
(Richard Avedon \/ Richard Avedon Foundation)<\/p>\n
Born in New York in 1923, Richard Avedon first became interested in fashion thanks to his father, who owned a women\u2019s clothing store on Fifth Avenue, which carried the latest fashion magazines. After serving in the Merchant Marine and working as a staff photographer, he was hired by Harper\u2019s Bazaar to cover the couture shows and models in post-World War II Paris. He incorporated movement and dance into a still medium, and shot his figures against stark white backgrounds, his signature style.<\/p>\n
He served as a visual consultant on Stanley Donen\u2019s 1957 film \u201cFunny Face,\u201d which starred Fred Astaire as a photographer who turns bookish Audrey Hepburn into a glamorous model. The movie, loosely based on Avedon\u2019s life, catapulted him into the spotlight.<\/p>\n
The exhibition\u2019s first section is filled with familiar images of early Avedon muses and subjects, mostly from the 1950s and \u201860s, including Suzy Parker, Lauren Hutton, Marlene Dietrich, Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, Judy Garland and Brigitte Bardot, as well as his first wife, model Doe Avedon. He captured Marilyn Monroe wearing a halter dress in a rare melancholic moment, and Charlie Chaplin holding his fingers up like devil\u2019s horns.<\/p>\n
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Marilyn Monroe, actress, dress by Norell, New York, May 1957. <\/p>\n
(Richard Avedon \/ Richard Avedon Foundation)<\/p>\n
Avedon\u2019s 1955 photograph of model Dovima posing in a black Dior gown while standing in between two circus elephants is among the most iconic pictures in fashion history \u2014 though the one of Nastassja Kinski with a snake wrapped around her nude body from 1981 is right up there, too.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s one of the things that Dick loved about working with performers,\u201d says Laura Avedon. \u201cHow their range of emotions were so vast and that they could tap into that range of human emotion and therefore the human experience. He had a depth of curiosity about people. He understood that all people are connected while photographing them in very simple and straightforward ways.\u201c<\/p>\n
Richard Avedon shot Hepburn dancing with Astaire on the set of \u201cFunny Face,\u201d and Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra filming \u201cGuys and Dolls\u201d in 1955. He followed Truman Capote around Kansas while the author was researching for his 1966 novel, \u201cIn Cold Blood.\u201d Avedon even photographed Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, the two men who committed the murders of the Clutter family, chronicled in the book.<\/p>\n
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Ronald Reagan, Orlando, Fla., March 4, 1976.<\/p>\n
(Richard Avedon \/ Richard Avedon Foundation)<\/p>\n
The exhibition\u2019s second section moves beyond models, actors and performers to focus on the people who influenced and wielded power behind the scenes in Hollywood. Directors like Steven Spielberg, Billy Wilder, John Huston, Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles. Writers such as Dorothy Parker, Tennessee Williams, Susan Sontag and William F. Buckley Jr. Former Presidents Ronald Reagan and Dwight D. Eisenhower; the latter\u2019s presidency was the first to benefit from the support of Hollywood celebrities. A goofy Harvey Weinstein mugging for the camera. And a 2001 pre-presidential Donald Trump photographed against a black frame with a look of menace on his face.<\/p>\n
\u201cI want people to come away with a sense of how interconnected Hollywood is,\u201d Laura Avedon said of the show. \u201cHow powerful those connections are and that they even involve presidential power. And the fact that all of these elements come together and form this system of American influence.\u201d<\/p>\n
Finally, she said, \u201cI hope they see that over the course of Avedon\u2019s long career that he kept interacting with Hollywood because Hollywood is an unavoidable American phenomenon.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018Richard Avedon: Hollywood\u2019<\/p>\n
Where: Gagosian, 456 N. Camden Dr., Beverly Hills<\/p>\n
When: Nov. 4 to Dec. 19, see website for times<\/p>\n
Cost: free<\/p>\n