Body of Evidence

Staging 'Evidence' at the Whitney Museum of American Art is, in a sense, the culmination of Richard Avedon's career. The scope of the exhibition, and that of its accompanying book/catalogue overlaps considerably with the recently published Richard Avedon: An Autobiography. But this retrospective blitz, which might be expected to facilitate a reassessment of Avedon's remarkable career, also raises questions both about his achievement over the last 50 years, and the current reception of his oeuvre. Avedon's critical status, formerly mixed at best, is being replaced by media adulation, whose blandness and lack of penetration is less than the work deserves. Ironically, this may be an inevitable consequence of his obsession with controlling the ways his photographs are represented.

Avedon's resolute modus operandi has, of course, often worked in his favour. So the first reason to welcome Evidence' is that, in its presentation, it maintains his creditable and long-running challenge to the stultifying Protestant tradition associated for over 30 years with the widespread but baleful influence of the photography exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In this respect 'Evidence recalls a much earlier Avedon show, held at the McCann-Erickson ad agency in 1965. Un-framed photographs were tacked onto, or propped up against the walls, hich were crammed with images from floor to ceiling. 20x16s jostled with contact sheets and huge blow-ups in a vintage display of Avedon's showmanship, in which he played with scale and layout in a spirited reaction against MoMA's conservatism. He has staunchly continued his counter-offensive against caution disguised as respect, against rows of dull little monochromes ossified into precious museum objects.

Avedon owed this graphic license to his magazine training, and especially to the example of his first mentor and art director, Alexey Brodovitch, from whom he learned the dynamics of the photograph on the page, and the inter-relationships, scaling and sequencing of groups of photographs. This reproduction oriented approach stood in opposition to the Stieglitz/Weston tradition of 'fine art' photography, and while Avedon clearly cherished Museum ambitions, their fulfilment would have to be largely on his own terms.

When news of David Ross' appointment as director of the Whitney was followed by the announcement that his first major exhibition was to be a Richard Avedon retrospective, some had their reservations. Hilton Kramer's widely publicised attack, in which he perpetuated many of the dreary old High/Low arguments, was no surprise, but perhaps reflected wider concerns about a glamorous photographer receiving the honour. Avedon was probably prepared for this; back in 1964 he was similarly attacked by Robert Brustein in the New York Review of Books for daring to stray into politics in his book Nothing Personal.

Brustein's charges of 'showbiz moralism' and 'radical chic' had devastated Avedon at the time, to the extent that, for five years, he stopped making portraits altogether. He got over it, but, as Jane Livingston, curator of 'Evidence', laments in her extended and informative catalogue essay, he has continued to alienate other factions. The 'fine art' status automatically accorded to the likes of Cindy Sherman has been denied him, and he still offends many of the 'purist' dogmatists within the art photography camp, who cling to the belief that his association with magazines and commerce undermines his claim to be taken seriously.

Avedon's presence at the Whitney may be a topic of less urgency in Britain, but it does have its resonances here. We shall not, for example, see this exhibition at the Tate, nor, under the gallery's present criteria (which exclude 'photographers who are not artists'), could we. Not that any British venue is listed on the itinerary for 'Evidence' -indeed, none of Avedon's museum exhibits has ever been seen here. One reason for this is that when Avedon was putting on his big Minneapolis show in 1970, or the Metropolitan Museum of Art retrospective in 1979, private corporate sponsorship was virtually unheard of here. And Avedon shows come with a hefty price-tag. 'Evidence', for example, was 'made possible by a generous grant from Harper's Bazaar', and both the catalogue and exhibition installation were underwritten by Kodak; even David Ross himself is not the Director, but the Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney.

Sponsorship, though, is an inevitable fact of life today. In any case, as Ingrid Sischy so comprehensively exposed in the New Yorker, even photographers such as Sebastião Salgado (a type often considered antithetical to Avedon) are often heavily funded, albeit in more covert ways. While we're on the subject, the novelist Jorge Amado recently claimed that Salgado 'could have easily earned a stack of money if he had photographed fashion, models, high society, parties.' Whatever one feels about these areas of photography, one would have thought that those who assume they are 'easy' would have been disabused by now. And it is as well Salgado would have earned more if he'd sold out to glamour, since his models would certainly have insisted on payment.

Avedon has run into controversy with his use of sponsorship too, not least with In the American West, his first foray into depicting the 'working classes'. The photography for this project, which was spread over five years, was funded by the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas. Richard Bolton, in The Contest of Meaning (1989), discussed the mobilisation of the media machine to support the exhibition as it rolled on through the museums of the United States. He was particularly alarmed at the implications of sponsorship at the ICA Boston show by the local department store, Filene's. The sponsor's strategy was to promote the show heavily locally, while using it as a vehicle to sell their own 'Western-style' clothes. Their campaign was tied in to a keynote image (which doubled as an exhibition poster), Avedon's portrait of a be-denimmed twelve year-old girl. The reasons for choosing this specific photograph to advertise fashions are all too clear.

Bolton claims that Avedon's public relations juggernaut (coupled with his careful control of the massive national editorial coverage) attempted to neutralise political readings of the plight of his disenfranchised Western sitters. But this is a complex issue. Avedon's sitters might find Bolton's stance condescending - many, after all, are on record as having expressed their pleasure at being included. It is hard to see that Avedon's quest to define himself through these people is inherently more exploitative than Bolton's outrage on their behalf in the cause of Marxist analysis.

Avedon explained in the accompanying book, and reiterated in the many interviews he gave, that his account of the American West was a fictionalised one. While it is disingenuous for a photographer to believe that this declaration gives absolution from all political or moral responsibility, we all tend to enjoy a good old gawp at people, and Avedon, who dares-to-stare more than most, can render faces almost tangible for us with his technical precision and incisiveness. No one willing to admit to sharing in this voyeuristic fascination is in a position to blame Avedon for having so ably facilitated it.

Perhaps Bolton's nose was put out of joint by his dealings with Avedon, for he must have come up against the photographer's over-concern with the way he is represented. Another essay (by Catherine Lord) in Bolton's book examined misrepresentations of a close friend of Avedon's, Diane Arbus. Lord compared two texts, the empty sensationalism of Patricia Bosworth's unauthorised biography, and Thomas Southall's scholarly but sanitised Diane Arbus: Magazine Work. The flaws in both these accounts stemmed partly from the insistence of Arbus' estate that before her photographs may be obtained, any accompanying text must have their full approval. Failure to agree to these conditions results in permission to reproduce the photos being withheld. This is patently counter-productive: it militates against serious critical analysis (who would submit to such demands), yet still failed to prevent Bosworth publishing (minus Arbus' photographs of course) a kind of twisted hagiography, full of wild and damaging inaccuracies.

Avedon, who frequently confesses in interviews that he is 'manipulative', operates a not dissimilar policy. So it is unlikely that the two essays in Evidence (besides Livingston's contribution there is an affectionate tribute from Adam Gopnik, art critic of the New Yorker - and thus a colleague of Avedon, now the magazine's staff photographer) were not carefully vetted. This is not unusual, many artists insist on it, but it is doubtful if the extensive excision of 'undesirable' material is not ultimately counter-productive. Together with the widespread media coverage Avedon now commands, we are seeing the careful construction of a myth, a personality cult; objectivity is discouraged, context is eliminated. An example of how this operates is his refusal to allow anyone else's photographs to be reproduced opposite his own. Thus the Avedons are situated in splendid, if only self-referential, isolation; you have to subscribe to the whole package - and that package is the Avedon phenomenon. (To be fair, 50 pages of the 'Evidence' catalogue are devoted to a chronology of his career, one year per page, which at least usefully re-situates many of the images in the context of his own published work).

Inevitably, only a sanitised version of the truth ever filters through this control of information. Instead we get David Ansen's 30 page puff in Newsweek, masquerading as objective journalism. There, we are allowed to share insights on the level of: 'She was having too good a time to hold a pose. He had to catch the moment.' (about a portrait of Janis Joplin). Unsubstantiated claims jostle with these hollow tales of heroism; we are told, for example, that in the 60s Avedon's portraits were 'influenced by the expressionist white background paintings of Egon Schiele', in spite of Avedon himself having only recently written that he 'hadn't really known' Schiele's work until 1986. Avedon has taken a lot of flack, much of it (especially from insular photography critics) doubtless ill-informed; but he has also received the encomia of heavyweights like Sontag, Barthes, and Baudrillard, and his impressive body of work surely warrants more serious attention than the kind of hype we are mostly left with, and that defensiveness encourages.

Many of the photographs in 'Evidence' will be known to those familiar with Richard Avedon: An Autobiography (or, for that matter, his earlier books, including Observations, Nothing Personal, and Portraits). Some of the early reportage work (much of it taken in 1949 for a Life magazine project which he abandoned) was included in Jane Livingston's earlier The New York School: Photographs 1936-1963; it again features strongly in 'Evidence', as it did in An Autobiography. Unfortunately, too much of the work (especially the almost de rigeur Harlem pictures) looks like routine 'street' photography of the 40s, and conveys no special meaning outside of Avedon's retrospective view of his own development. Livingston notes their affinity with the much more extensive bodies of work by New York photographers Saul Leiter and Louis Faurer. But the proposition that the types of street subjects he selected were echoed in his fashion and portraiture is by no means proved. (The case is better made with the earlier Italian street pictures, many of which were published in his first book, Observations). A black woman caught slightly unawares on a Harlem street is handsome, dignified, but these are qualities extrinsic to anything Avedon achieved with the photograph. Similarly the shoe-shine man on Lenox Avenue is no more than a desultory snapshot. These are by no means bad photographs, but their nostalgic appeal is not quite enough. A subtle repositioning is in operation, a re-writing of history, as though Avedon's prowess in reportage might elevate the tone of his whole oeuvre, deflecting accusations of narrowness. 'Evidence' does, on the other hand, include some 'new' work (for example, the recent portrait of Antonioni and his wife, and the New Yorker photograph of Frank Zappa) where he's on surer footing, where he is able to direct the confrontation with his subject.

An Autobiography is sequenced and organised so that Avedon's preoccupation with the 'big themes' - family, isolation, death - emerges more clearly than ever before. Many of the photographs are arranged in pairs. The trouble is, if this elevated agenda is to be maintained, some of the pairings Avedon describes as 'eccentric' simply fail to make sense. Oppositions which might be considered psychologically profound are undermined by others which appear to have no more than a trite graphic connection. Photographs which, encountered individually on the gallery wall are strikingly effective, diminish rather than complement one another when unsuitably coupled in the book. The bled pages and the deep gutter exacerbate this: the uniformly breathless pace and relentless graphic sledge-hammering build into claustrophobic confusion. Equally regrettable is the homogeneity of treatment which allows equal prominence to a boyhood snapshot and, say, the portrait of Francis Bacon.

Most disquieting are the carefully-crafted, neutral backdrop photographs of napalm victims. For whose benefit were they taken? There is a thin line, of course, between these constructed studio photographs and a regular journalistic image of the same harrowing subject - Sontag long ago questioned the tidy geometry of a Don McCullin photograph of the victim of another war. The photographs of napalmed Vietnamese were taken in 1971; they were not published at the time, and apparently Avedon was ambivalent about doing so now. But do they really convey compassion? What should one's reaction be when confronted by people with such horrific injuries? Doubts about his sincerity are raised in particular by the juxtaposition of the mutilated face of a nameless woman in Saigon with a Vogue photograph from the Paris collections. We can see the connection: the Cardin dress shrouds the woman's body, radically rearranging her substance - two kinds of physical transformation - but it was surely a point better made with a more appropriate vehicle. The inspiration for this linkage has more in common with the shock tactics of Benetton's advertising campaign. The Vietnam photographs raise doubts about Avedon's other intermittent swoops into morally dubious areas: one begins to question whether the studies of Louisiana mental patients, for example, are not more predatory than compassionate; Livingston's description of them as 'harrowing and yet lyrical' underlines precisely the problem.

These occasional lapses in judgement mostly occur when Avedon strays too far from his home territory. Adam Gopnik gets to the heart of it when he identifies that at the core of Avedon's talent is his theatricality. It is what makes enduring photographs like The Generals of the Daughters of the American Revolution so effective, where the 'victims' are fair game and the political component is conveyed theatrically, as satire. Barthes' analogy between theatre and wrestling (what is expected of both is 'intelligible representation of moral situations which are usually private.') is recalled here: 'What the public wants,' Barthes remarked, 'is images of passion, not passion itself', and Avedon is their abundant and incisive provider.

Avedon's most compelling photographs are about performance - his performance as well as his subjects' - and depend on the engagement of their personalities. For this reason it is difficult to separate the photographer from the man. Indeed it is partly owing to the ineluctable presence of Avedon's own psychology that his portraits transcend the mainstream of cultural history. They are confrontations which resist interpretation solely as contemporary documents - they defy analysis solely in terms of the Zeitgeist. Yet ultimately the power of much of Avedon's work stems from the fact that his needs and concerns are also universal ones. More on this is, hopefully, forthcoming; Evidence is only the latest stage in an extensive publishing package which is expected to include Avedon's written autobiography, and, to judge from his 1987 essay 'Borrowed Dogs', he is capable of writing well, and with disarming honesty. As long ago as 1949, in Alexey Brodovitch's short-lived magazine Portfolio, he showed both introspection and self-awareness: 'Photography for me', he stated, 'has always been a sort of double-sided mirror. The one side reflecting my subject, the other reflecting myself. As my personality developed through analysis, naturally my work matured.'

Significantly, Avedon cites Nadar, Cameron, and Brady as his earliest influences in portraiture, all of whom were among the first Victorian photographer-taxonomists. And his clearest parallel as a photographic classifier of physiognomical types is August Sander. Cut to the young Avedon, the obsessive collector of autographs, another kind of scalp-hunter. He refers today to having overcome what he perceives as his former social inadequacies; perhaps the avid hunting down of the rich and famous was as an early attempt both to test and define himself, as if the magic might rub off and compensate for his supposed shortcomings. As a photographer, the urban jungle of post-war New York was his natural habitat, enabling both his own development and the tracking down of his big game - celebrity. For 50 years, Avedon's empathy for, and insight into his chosen milieu, has brought to his nervy, restless photographs a continuing fascination. It will be a pity if the desire for control precludes serious enquiry into the complexities of a formidable body of work.

Richard Avedon: Evidence 1944-1994 and An Autobiography, Richard Avedon are both published by Jonathan Cape. The retrospective 'Richard Avedon: Evidence 1944-1994' will begin its tour at The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, on March 24.