“Richard Avedon: Evidence, 1944–1994” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
March 23–June 26, 1994
In a culture that deems the celebrity snaps of Annie Leibovitz worthy of a multi-city, international retrospective, it should come as no surprise to find Richard Avedon regarded as an Old Master. The Whitney Museum’s “Evidence, 1944–1994” is the photographer’s second retrospective at a major New York museum, the first having taken place at the Metropolitan just over fifteen years ago.
It seems that the kind of photography of which Avedon really is a master—fashion work of the sort done for Harper’s Bazaar in the Forties and Fifties, which yielded icons such as his Dovima with Elephants—now embarrasses him, for it is absent from the show. This has allowed Avedon to reinvent himself, to liquidate Avedon the fashion photographer and to re-emerge as Avedon the hard-boiled but tender-hearted social documentarian. Hence the show’s pretentious title. Avedon wants to be seen as a photographer on the front lines, holding up this “evidence” to tell us who we really are.
Thus we have Avedon’s pictures of the psychiatric ward, the civil-rights struggle, Vietnam, the Chicago Seven, the contemporary American West, and the collapse of the Berlin Wall. It’s the path of an artist uncomfortable with bourgeois society’s refined taste and sophistication and eager to hop on the counterculture’s bandwagon of “relevance” and social concern.
But Avedon’s efforts at a reinvention of self fail; these photographs are empty and flat.