Richard Avedon – Power Portraits
November 22, 2008
Richard Avedon brings his famous and distinct style to this set of portraits he made taken through his illustrious career. This set of portraits are of people that Avedon has met and made images of people that he saw as being in some sort of power at some point or another in their lives.
Most of the images are Avedon’s classic style of his subject against a white background. I have loved Avedon’s work since I first got into photography. His style is something that people have tried to mimic since he became big. We all know what they say, imitation is the biggest form of flattery. Avedon’s portraits are renowned for how his subjects open up to the camera in that one single frame.
The only images out of the “Portraits of Power” series that I saw the only one that I didn’t really get is the out of focus photograph of Malcomn X. I couldn’t really get why Avedon took this image when it was out of focus. All of the other images I saw from this collection are all perfectly in focus and expertly composed and exposed and yet this one is really quite out of focus. I started to think that it could be to do with who the subject is in this image. I thought that it could be something to do with the fact that at the time when the image was made Malcomn X was such a big force and so busy that he could not afford the time to sit still long enough to have his picture made by Avedon. Another idea was that at the time X was scared for his life so again he didn’t want to sit still for too long which again all of this adds another layer to Avedon’s image.
What I want to take from Richard Avedon’s work is the clean and crisp style of his images. I love how easy Avedon makes his style look and how easy it makes it to read the looks on his subjects faces. What they feel, where they are in their lives and so on. I mean obviously with something like this you can’t be sure that you are right about what you are seeing as you aren’t there to ask the subjects what they are feeling. I feel though that this is one of the biggest and best parts of photography. With reading images there are no rights and there are no wrongs. There is just what the viewer feels about specific images. What they like about them, what they dislike about them and what they feel about them.
