7/1/2023 0 Comments Richard avedon picturesRelationships brings together Avedon’s individual portraits with portraits of couples and groups to consider what happens when you add a third (fourth, or even fifth) to the mix. Featuring 100 photographs, the book brings together classic works like the 1957 portrait of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in New York – looking unguardedly woeful and worn – and the 1963 portrait of basketball star Lew Alcindor (before he changed his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) on a New York street court in his uniform, looking like a supermodel. “These pictures don’t just happen,” says Senf, chief curator at the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, which houses the collection from which the photographs in Relationships are drawn. But by 1974, life had taken its toll, as Capote’s gaze is heavy, hooded eyes sunken inside a puffy, wrinkled face flecked with sunspots and topped by an ever-thinning pate. In the 1955 portrait, Capote plays the angelic ingénue, topless to boot, his head tilting back to the right, eyes closed, shoulders slipping away, his fame and fortune as sure as his boyish beauty. His 19 portraits of Truman Capote are the stuff of Southern Gothic novels when placed side by side, as they are in the book. Over a period of six decades, Avedon encountered some of the most influential people of his time, at times photographing them more than once – and the time between sittings tells a story unto itself.
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