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Richard Avedon, The Chicago Seven: Lee Weiner, John Froines, Abbie Hoffman, Rennie Davis, Jerry Rubin, Tom Hayden, Dave Dellinger, Chicago, Illinois, November 5, 1969, Gelatin silver print, 106 x 252", Lent by The MetropolitanMuseum of Art, Gift of the artist, 2002 (2002.379.4).

Corcoran Gallery of Art
500 Seventeenth Street NW
202-639-1700
Washington
Richard Avedon
Portraits of Power
September 13, 2008-
January 25, 2009

By FRANK GOODYEAR, III

My wife thinks this is the best photograph that has ever been taken of me ... Being in Rolling Stone in such spectacular company, how can you miss when you are in such good company? ... I wish I looked like that today. I think that this is the most flattering picture.

— Felix Rohatyn, New York financier

Avedon was an elitist snob who deliberately set me up ... The portrait is foolish, stupid, insulting. It makes me look like a complete idiot.

— Karl Rove, political strategist

An invitation to be photographed by Richard Avedon merited attention, even by those whose reputations were of equal measure. Famous for fashioning memorable, provocative portraits of his subjects, Avedon created images that resonate, causing viewers to pause and reflect. In this age of the casual snapshot, when the blur of pictures that comprise modern life can leave one disoriented, he saw his portrait photographs not as ephemeral fragments, but rather as markers of a shared humanity capable of withstanding the onrush of time. Although Avedon, photographed several thousand individuals during his lengthy career, the opportunity to pose before his camera was something noteworthy.

Avedon’s exceptionality as a portrait photographer within fashion and editorial worlds prompts a series of questions about his working methods and about the nature of his collaborations with his subjects. A portrait is the product of a dynamic exchange — sometimes cooperative, sometimes contested — between no less than two individuals. Because a portrait has the potential to reshape our understanding of its subject, this interaction — which unfolds not only during the session itself, but also before and after — can be fraught with a variety of different tensions. This is especially the case when the photographic subject is someone whose face is in the public’s consciousness, as was true of so many of the people who posed before his camera.

The majority of men and women Avedon photographed understood the power that images wield in the marketplace and in the political arena. In an effort to learn about Avedon as a portraitist, I invited a number of his political subjects to speak about their experience of being photographed and their feelings about the portraits Avedon made. Select excerpts from these interviews are interwoven throughout this essay. As each was much accustomed to being photographed, I asked them to recall details that stood out during their time with Avedon. What did he do differently than other photographers, what was their interchange like, and to what degree did they feel they had an active hand in the portrait that resulted? In addition, I asked them to reflect more generally on the role that portrait photographs have played in shaping public opinion. Focusing attention on the people in Avedon’s portraits provides an opportunity to understand more fully his creative process; it also allows one to appreciate the role that these photographs have had in the ongoing discourse about power and democracy in America.

I remember thinking that I should not do it because I didn’t have time, but someone urged me to do it, and so I did ... The photograph was not taken at my location, but at his ... A series of us did it, as I recall, and he stayed located there with lights, cameras, and assistants. I can remember having a time, and I just popped in and did it and left. It didn’t take long.

— Donald Rumsfeld, former Secretary of Defense

He knew what he wanted. He knew exactly how he was lighting it, what he was looking for. He came in with a concept ... I like the portrait very much. I think there’s a sense of optimism about it. To be honest with you, though, I pushed him on that a little. I gave him a lot of smiling pictures. I said, look, a lot of people rap me for being too serious — I don’t think I am ... I remember distinctly trying to smile a lot.

— John Kerry, U.S. senator from Massachusetts

Avedon first made a name for himself as a fashion photographer. In this work, he went to great lengths to construct photographs that showed off the beauty of his models and the clothes they wore. Travel, elaborate props, and long hours with models were often required to satisfy what he, together with advertising executives and magazine editors, desired. Although his fashion photography and his editorial work had elements in common, they differed in a significant way: those whom Avedon photographed for editorial assignments did not work for Avedon or for the publication in which their portrait was to appear. While a politician is just as likely as a model to perform before the camera, Avedon’s editorial subjects had distinct reasons for agreeing to pose, and their own ideas about their public self-image. Most knew of Avedon prior to their session, and were flattered by the invitation to have their portrait made. Although few acknowledged that such an image might enhance their reputation, their desire for publicity — for themselves, and sometimes for the larger causes of which they were a part — fueled their willingness to accept his invitation.

Avedon’s portrait projects were increasingly important to him as his career developed. While he looked forward to these interactions, he felt there were some figures that were easier to work with than others. At the outset of his work on The Family, a bicentennial portrait of America’s power elite published in Rolling Stone in 1976, he expressed hesitation about photographing politicians in an interview in The Washington Post. Working with literary and artistic figures was generally rewarding — often exceedingly so — yet he thought “there were very few people in Washington” he longed to photograph. “They know what to do with their faces,” he remarked, suggesting an earlier frustration in working with politicians seasoned at posing for the camera. “There has to be a connection between me and the people I photograph ... I have to get some sense that we’re all in the same boat.”7 No doubt cultural figures could be just as obstinate before his camera. The key was getting his subjects to reveal something about themselves as they performed before the camera. Avedon recognized both the creative possibilities available in this type of exchange as well as a competing series of challenges that required preparation and at times negotiation.

He came to my house in Laurel Canyon, and there’s a little pathway on the side of the house. He put up a white screen there and he had me stand in front of it ... He obviously knew exactly what he wanted, and he knew how to get it. It was very pleasant, very businesslike, and maybe a little briefer — maybe a lot briefer — than other photographers who have photographed me.

— Jerry Brown, former California governor

When Avedon did the photographs way back, there was so much activity at the time. I remember that he was very businesslike, very straightforward, very well-prepared, and that’s about it ... It was done at a time when everyone was speculating about who was going to go on what flight. They had narrowed it down to Alan, Gus, and me.

— John Glenn, former astronaut and U.S. senator from Ohio

Avedon and his team of assistants worked deliberately to take charge of each session — in part to forestall any potential problems, but also to anticipate the type of composition he wanted to achieve. Avedon prepared himself thoroughly, often learning as much about a new subject as he could prior to their meeting. For example, knowing an individual’s height permitted him to set up his camera such that a consistent visual format from one subject to the next was ensured. However, his research often went far beyond the acquisition of such mundane details. In preparing for a photo shoot, he at times made sketches of the picture he sought; at other times he arranged himself or his assistants in front of the camera to test preferred poses or lighting concepts. Throughout Avedon’s career, pre-visualization was an important element to his working method.

While subjects might have had their own agenda, Avedon established a well-defined arrangement at the time of the session that permitted a direct interchange between himself and the individual being portrayed. Beginning in 1969, when he first began using a large-format Deardorff camera, Avedon made a habit of standing directly beside his camera — rather than behind it — in order to heighten this connection and to lessen any sense of mediation. As he later remarked, “I no longer wanted to hide behind the camera. I wanted to meet my sitters man to man. I wanted nothing to help the photograph except what I could draw out of the sitter.”

His signature white backdrop, which varied in shade and by exposure, served the same purpose, as did his frequent tendency to restrict access to the portrait shoot so that only the subject, himself, and an assistant to switch plates in the camera were present. Given the limited time that he had with many of his political subjects, Avedon recognized the need to simplify what would occur and to keep subjects focused. Yet time constraints often worked to his advantage, in part because they supported his goal of establishing a heightened sense of immediacy. In reflecting on their time with Avedon, his subjects frequently noted the brevity of their sessions with the famous photographer. Many were indeed very short — sometimes no more than 10 minutes. More significantly, though, they were also tightly-controlled exchanges that resulted in the type of performance that he sought in his subjects. “I think when they walked in and saw the camera, they felt the gravity of the moment,” Avedon explained at the time of The Family’s publication. “From a ‘photo opportunity,’ it became a portrait.”

All of the photos were rather matter-of-fact — minimal instructions and minimal posing by him. Just look in the camera and click. I knew who he was — and may have met him before the first photo was taken. He had agreed to let photographers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) spend time with him in New York training ... On each occasion, I was highly flattered to be photographed by him and excited to be in his presence, but I didn’t take advantage of the opportunity to talk to him at any length and have always regretted it.

— Julian Bond, political activist and chairman of the NAACP

I knew that he was a very significant person, and my colleagues at SNCC and I all liked him very much. He was very personable, very likeable. We felt that he was honoring us by coming to take photographs in the South. He made it clear that he had a lot of admiration for what we were doing, and since we lost a lot of cameras during our work, he was responsible for getting us new cameras at a low cost.

— Bob Zellner, civil rights activist

When Avedon got down to Atlanta, people were picketing a segregated roller-skating rink, and he did some shooting of us marching up and down there. And then he decided what he wanted — he must have had a picture in his mind — he wanted us all on neutral ground, on the highway, and he posed Julian up front and me and Bob behind him. As I recall, there was a sign that said Atlanta pointing with an arrow ... We are not smiling, we’re just standing there. The photo shows that the grinning and tap-dancing days are over. There’s a seriousness of purpose here.

— Dorothy Zellner, civil rights activist.

Avedon’s white backdrop and the extreme frontality of many of his portraits have led some to believe that he created images that aspired to transcend the subjectivity characteristic of most editorial photography. At times, reviewers have celebrated Avedon’s ability to move beyond ideology in order to document the American political and cultural landscape in broad and dispassionate terms. A few have compared his work to the portrait photography of August Sander, renowned for documenting a cross-section of German society in the 1920s Weimar Republic. Sander’s portraits suggest photography’s potential as an objective recorder of a nation and its people.

This sentiment — that photographs simply describe — has invested the medium with significant power over the course of its history. Although Avedon understood well the medium’s inherent subjectivity, a large number of his editorial subjects remain wedded to the conceit that photographs do not lie and that a distinguished portraitist such as Avedon would not partake in polemics with his work. They entered into this exchange believing that it was a relatively innocent act. This opinion, combined with Avedon’s reluctance to speak directly about his photography’s relationship to politics and power, may further explain why he was able to attract so many influential political and cultural figures from both the left and the right.

For those who were hesitant to pose before Avedon’s camera, many reached the conclusion that the rewards for participating outweighed the risks. Although some might not have fully understood what they were getting involved in, Avedon rarely made a portrait as an overt celebration or condemnation of a particular individual or group of individuals. “I try to allow the people really — if that’s possible — to photograph themselves. It’s interesting. I think they pose because they want to be told something about themselves that they didn’t know.”15 Avedon’s engagement with politics varied over the course of his life, yet his photographic sessions with political and cultural leaders, while carefully orchestrated, were not typically built upon a desire to lift up or knock down a subject. His caricatured portrait of segregationist governor George Wallace from 1963 and his series of sympathetic photographs depicting SNCC demonstrators in Atlanta taken the same year suggest that exceptions did occur.

For the most part, though, Avedon worked to create situations that allowed subjects to reveal their character as they thought most fitting. While he often had a notion about an individual ahead of time, he expected his subjects to present themselves or at least a part of themselves to him. Like an actor on a theatrical set, the individual before the camera could bring forth one or a variety of different faces. Avedon understood that every person is a collection of different personas; some are shared publicly, others remain private. What he looked for in capturing one’s likeness on film were those instances, as conveyed though expression or gesture, when he believed an individual had revealed something interesting about one’s self. As he remarked in 1980, “It’s not possible to do my kind of work without the person being photographed becoming — in a sense — a performer. They perform for the camera and for me, and I work with that performance. It’s like a conversation.”

I was honored to be shot by him ... and tickled pink about the image. He didn’t make me do anything I didn’t want to do; he just allowed me to be myself.

— James Carville, political strategist

I must confess that I had only the vaguest idea of who Avedon was. Yet, when I mentioned it to various people, I got looks of wonderment, and it was conveyed to me that I was uniquely privileged ... About Avedon, the dominant impression that I came away with was of his modesty. You know, by the time I went there I had been sufficiently indoctrinated by my friends and colleagues to realize that this was a unique privilege and that I was going to meet a really great man. And I went there — so to speak — in that mood. Yet he didn’t act that part at all. He was very modest, very quiet, attentive to my needs.

— Bernard Lewis, historian of Islam and the Middle East

When photographing political and cultural figures, Avedon only occasionally imparted any significant direction to his subjects about how to pose or what to wear. There were times when he spoke up and provided instructions to those before the camera, but these words were often only suggestions intended to help one feel comfortable. Rare were the instances when he led a subject to adopt a particular pose or to wear a specific outfit. Many recall that Avedon was largely silent during the shoot. Beforehand, he might speak a little about the project on which he was working, but for the most part he tended to avoid conversations that might color the exchange. Avedon was hardly antisocial; rather, he aspired to keep these sessions as straightforward and professional as possible.

With the men and women he photographed, Avedon welcomed a measure of spontaneity and chance. Although many of his subjects — not to mention reviewers and audiences more generally — regarded him as the director in charge of this exchange, Avedon encouraged a certain degree of independence on their part. In fact, as he sought likenesses that conveyed a genuine performance, Avedon required this type of participation and was heartened when his subjects responded. “What gives a photograph power or beauty is really such a private thing. It’s between the photographer and the sitter,” he remarked in an interview in 1965. In describing this interaction on another occasion, he reflected that “sometimes the force of it grows so strong that sounds in the studio go unheard. Time stops. We share a brief, intense intimacy. But it’s unearned. It has no past ... no future.”

While he might have welcomed the unexpected, Avedon had ultimate control over the proceedings. Although assisted by others, he was responsible for conceptualizing the structure of a particular project, organizing and overseeing the shoot, and choosing the final portrait for publication or inclusion within a larger portfolio. Subjects never had a voice in these decisions. Avedon’s own vision determined the choices he made during these different phases, and it is clear that he was much more than a neutral observer.

I always thought that picture was too harsh. My hair looks funny, and talk about wrinkles. But I can never forget Avedon. I always thought he was so damn good. He was one of a handful of photographers
whose work was always noteworthy.

— Ben Bradlee, vice president of The Washington Post

I was all prepared to wear a suit, something that was appropriate for being a member of Congress, and he said he wanted me to wear a sports shirt, something from Hawaii ... When I saw the finished product, I remember asking, ‘Is that the way I look?’ Because if you look at most of my pictures, they are all political smiling portraits. And this one — I don’t know whether it is sinister or something else.

— Daniel Inouye, U.S. senator from Hawaii

Perhaps not surprisingly, the resulting portraits from these sessions have provoked a range of responses from Avedon’s subjects. Many expressed great admiration for the choices that Avedon made and the expertise that he brought to his craft. Others, though, were curious about his decisions, questioning for instance why he seemed to avoid smiling faces or why he chose a particular image from the many that were created. A select few were left only with disgust for him and the portrait that he made of them. This type of reaction stemmed from an after-the-fact
awareness that Avedon’s intentions were not their own, but also from a sense that photography — and Avedon’s style of photography, in particular — was ill-suited to the grand purpose that he seemed to envision for the work. How exactly, some wondered, was a series of portrait photographs supposed to convey insight into such themes as democracy and power? In retrospect, though, the large number of public figures who agreed to pose for Avedon on multiple occasions attests to the prevailing respect that his subjects have had for him and for his photography.

Avedon was often cognizant of how his subjects reacted to his work, though on multiple occasions he acknowledged that he was not primarily concerned with these feelings. As he explained to a New York Times critic in the fall of 1975, at the time of his much-discussed monographic exhibition at the Marlborough Gallery, “Whether or not people like my portraits of them isn’t the point. Each of my portraits is more a portrait of myself than of someone else — a portrait of what I know, what I feel, what I’m afraid of.” Despite complaints that he was cruel in seizing upon and picturing weakness in people — an opinion that he found untrue, yet one that led then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to remark “be kind to me” prior to being photographed in 1976 — Avedon continued to cultivate sessions in which a dynamic contest might prevail.

Avedon’s subjects were not the only ones affected by this time together. Avedon once described how such interactions, or “exchange of feelings,” left him uneasy. Unlike a model with whom he had a working relationship, “the nature of a portrait sitting is so intense, so short-lived, so intimate that there’s almost a kind of embarrassment when it’s over. I often go into a room where there’s someone I’ve photographed a week before and I think there’s an awkwardness after such a charged exchange.” For Avedon, the photographs “have a reality for me that the people don’t. It’s through the photographs that I know them.”

I was never comfortable with the notion of projecting an image as a useful act. On the first occasion, I knew little or nothing about Avedon and thought the fact that he was taking our pictures meant that we were on the verge of selling out, being commodified ... Avedon, I sensed the last time I saw him, had a feeling about his own absurdity, but had become a craftsman, a recorder of American life, and is to be thanked for the visual diary of our lives which he recorded as a witness.

— Tom Hayden, political activist and former state senator from California

I was really taken by how much he thought about the situation. He was paying attention ... The photography of the ’60s — the more distance I get from it — is among the most powerful things of the period. I don’t think that will be true today because of the video images we have of virtually everything. The iconic photography of Vietnam, the black freedom movement, the women’s movement, the anti-war movement, draft resistors, GIs throwing their medals back is as evocative as the music of the period. It is really these two domains, photography and music, it seems to me that transcend and touch the whole landscape of the times, that tap the unique rebellious revolutionary moment.

— Bernardine Dohrn, law professor and political activist

Avedon was not the first portrait photographer to use his camera to shape American politics. (Mathew Brady wins that distinction with his “Gallery of Illustrious Americans.”) During the latter half of the 20th century, though, he was unsurpassed in his creation of a body of portraiture that not only featured many of the important political and cultural figures of the day, but that also encouraged serious contemplation of the individuals who have taken leading roles in America’s democracy. His bold, revealing portraits make visible these key figures and provide the opportunity for a larger conversation about how power is exercised. Avedon’s own stance towards politics evolved, becoming over time more broad-minded and at times nostalgic. As his final project Democracy indicated, he remained as provocative — even confrontational — as in his early book with James Baldwin, Nothing Personal.

For Avedon, editorial photography was as much an ideological act as an aesthetic exercise. Although some of his subjects may have accepted an invitation to pose before his camera out of politeness or perhaps vanity, the great majority agreed knowing that the resulting portrait would elicit some type of response and understanding that Avedon was largely in charge of the proceedings. These men and women entered into this collaboration believing that formal photographic portraits played a role in their own work, and most respected the terms of the arrangement. Like Avedon, each brought his or her own hopes and prejudices into the studio. The outcome was the product of this exchange — at times inspiring, at times surprising, at times upsetting, but rarely uninteresting.

— Frank Goodyear, III, is Assistant Curator of Photography, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., from the book Richard Avedon: Portraits of Power, a joint publication of Steidl and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, 2008

Richard Avedon, Marian Anderson, contralto, New York, June 30, 1955 Gelatin silver print 32-7/8 x 36-7/8", © 2008 The Richard Avedon Foundation.

Richard Avedon, Charles Chaplin leaving America, New York, September 13, 1952, Gelatin silver print, 42-5/8 x 67-1/8", © 2008 The RichardAvedon Foundation.

Richard Avedon, Dwight David Eisenhower, President of the United States, Palm Springs, California, January 31, 1964, Gelatin silver print, 44 x 40", © The Richard Avedon Foundation.

Richard Avedon, Joan Baez, singer, New York, June 18, 1965, Gelatin silver print, 20 x 16", © 2008 The Richard Avedon Foundation.

Richard Avedon, Carson McCullers, writer, Nyack, New York, June 14, 1958, Gelatin silver print, 19-7/8 x 15-7/8", Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Richard Avedon Archive/Gift of the artist.

Richard Avedon, Ezra Pound, poet, at the home of William Carlos Williams, Rutherford, New Jersey, June 30, 1958, Gelatin silver print, 54 x 43-1/2", © The Richard Avedon Foundation.

Richard Avedon, Bob Dylan, musician, Central Park, New York, February 10, 1965, Gelatin silver print, 19-1/2 x 15-5/8", © 2008 The Richard Avedon Foundation.

Richard Avedon, Arundhati Roy, novelist, New York, May 12, 1998, Gelatin silver print, 20 x 16", © The Richard Avedon Foundation.

Richard Avedon, William Burroughs, writer, New York, July 9, 1975, Gelatin silver print, 41-3/4 x 33", Lent by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the artist, 2002 (2002.379.25).

Richard Avedon, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, writer, New York, January 7, 1976, Gelatin silver print, 10 x 8", Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Richard Avedon Archive/Gift of the artist.

Richard Avedon, Jerry Brown, Governor of California, Sacramento, California (from The Family, a portfolio of 69 portraits), March 20, 1976, Gelatin silver print 14 x 11", National Portrait Gallery,Smithsonian Institution, this acquisition was made possible by generous contributions from Jeane W. Austin and the James Smithson Society.

Richard Avedon, Ronald Reagan, former Governor of California, Orlando, Florida (from the series The Family), March 4, 1976, Gelatin silver print 40 x 33", © The Richard Avedon Foundation.

Richard Avedon, Karl Rove, Senior Adviser to President George W. Bush, Republican National Convention, New York (from the series Democracy), September 1, 2004, Gelatin silver print, 14 x 11", © The Richard Avedon Foundation.

Richard Avedon, Allen Ginsberg's Family, Patterson, New Jersey, May 3, 1970 (Image not in exhibition).

Corcoran Gallery of Art
500 Seventeenth Street NW
202-639-1700
Washington
Richard Avedon
Portraits of Power
September 13, 2008-
January 25, 2009

By PAUL ROTH

In 1964 Richard Avedon published a book called Nothing Personal, a collaborative project with writer James Baldwin and designer Marvin Israel. A complex volume wherein Baldwin’s social commentary alternated with Avedon’s photographs, Nothing Personal was an unusually thoughtful photography book for the time.

The book was made, and received, as a statement. Avedon scheduled its publication on the eve of the epochal 1964 United States presidential election, during which President Lyndon Johnson faced off against Senator Barry Goldwater in a time of national anxiety following the assassination of President of John F. Kennedy. Nothing Personal followed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by three months. “It was my attempt to create a photographic polemic about racism,” Avedon later remembered, “art is generally so oblique about its political concerns; this time I wanted there to be no mistake about my convictions.”

While some critics praised the book’s inventive and unsparing critique, many others disparaged it. Much of the criticism was unforgiving, even brutal, and Nothing Personal is now regarded as one of the most controversial photography books ever produced. Avedon was badly stung by the book’s negative reception. Between 1965 and 1969 he made few portraits, instead devoting himself primarily to fashion work for Vogue. “I had this block,” he recalled, “I finished Nothing Personal … and then went blank. I couldn’t photograph — well, I could photograph, but I couldn’t do anything that meant anything to me for a great number of years.” During that period of retrenchment, Avedon’s opinion of Nothing Personal also shifted, and years later he admitted “the weak work [in the book] falls into the trap of making caricatures to get across a point. That’s the risk of all polemical art.”

In the face of this artistic crisis, Avedon developed a new perspective on his photography, and on his role as a social critic and observer of the human condition. By the end of the decade, motivated in part by seismic political and cultural shifts in American life, he created a radical new style that addressed the times. In 1969, he entered a period of technical, compositional, and directorial experimentation. Rejecting the physiognomic extremes that had characterized his earlier approach to portraiture, he resolved to make images that shunned lyricism and psychological revelation. Embracing minimalism, frontality, and stillness where he previously sought a compacted, expressive, and theatrical representation, Avedon reinvented himself as an artist.

Through 1976, when he made his extraordinary photo-essay The Family, Avedon evolved through a remarkably singular focus on the subject of power. During this time he obsessively photographed people engaged in social and political debates. This important period of his career is essentially unexamined and little understood. Emerging from aesthetic crisis, Avedon adopted a new vision and developed his mature style during eight prolific years, creating some of his richest, starkest, most mysterious photography.

January-August 1969:
The Inception of Hard Times
The incendiary political atmosphere of late 1960s America seemed unprecedented to many at the time. A past president of Student for a Democratic Society, writer Todd Gitlin later referred to the period as “a cyclone in a wind tunnel.” Weather Underground Organization leader Bernardine Dohrn remembers it as “a coming apart.”

Avedon, like a growing number of Americans, was thoroughly opposed to the country’s expanding military campaign in Vietnam. Events in the war zone, broadcast on news reports, captivated the populace; so too did the increasingly aggressive civil disobedience of young American antiwar activists. In 1968 alone there were many significant revolts: antiwar and Black Power student radicals occupied several buildings at Columbia University; insurrectionists at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago were repeatedly attacked by police officers; and student uprisings in Czechoslovakia, France, Mexico, Poland, Germany, and England dominated the news. That year Avedon made portraits of prominent activists against the war, including philosopher Bertrand Russell, Yippie leader Abbie Hoffman, and Senator Eugene McCarthy, a presidential candidate campaigning on an antiwar platform.

Avedon was also sensitized to the rise of youth culture in America at the end of the sixties, in large part because of his ongoing editorial magazine work. His studio hosted a constant influx of young models, graphic designers, art directors, and studio assistants, bringing great awareness of trends in art, music, literature, and design. Avedon’s teenage son, John, was a participant in the counterculture during these years, attending antiwar demonstrations and taking part in the nascent Free School Movement, co-founding an open-hierarchy educational program called the New World School.

Early in 1969 the Student Mobilization Committee (SMC), one of the most prominent national organizations rallying opposition to the war, invited Avedon to make a promotional poster. Avedon agreed, and enlisted the help of artist and designer Marvin Israel. Together they transformed a photograph of a soldier with a white dove into a red, white, and blue graphic, evoking the aesthetics of photographic solarization and Andy Warhol’s silkscreens. At the bottom of the poster, the tagline read: “Who has a better right to oppose the war?” For the next several years he would frequently lend support to antiwar and countercultural organizations.

That same year, having recovered from the fallout of Nothing Personal, Avedon began to make more serious photographic work. In April, he made an intriguing set of mid-length portraits of Andy Warhol. Posing against a gray studio backdrop, Warhol exposed his torso surgery scars from Valerie Solanas’ recent attempt on his life. This sitting clearly had a significant effect on Avedon; he would repeatedly photograph Warhol, his scars, and his retinue of “Factory” regulars in the coming months. More importantly, it was the first time Avedon experimented with a new stylistic approach, one grounded in studio use of a Deardorff 8 x 10-inch view camera.

While he had used a view camera many times before, Avedon’s principal camera was a Rolleiflex 2-1⁄4-inch square twin lens camera. Around this time he credited the Rollei with his recent frustrations: “I lost interest, or I lost a sense of immediacy, and necessity, of making a photograph … the Rolleiflex seemed to me to be taking the picture [for me]. Everything I’d discovered early on became a cliché, became a habit.” Characterizing the medium format camera as a physical and mental obstacle that separated him from his subjects, Avedon recalled: “They couldn’t see my eyes, and I couldn’t see them. I saw them as a picture. And I felt as if a human connection was lost.”

That same spring, Avedon mulled offers to mount major museum exhibitions of his work. Museum of Modern Art curator John Szarkowski visited Avedon’s studio three times between February and April to discuss a show of new work, which he had offered Avedon a year earlier. Carroll “Ted” Hartwell, of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, arrived the following month to begin organizing a career survey, planned since 1968.xii Avedon did not easily consent to show his work during this period; he had rejected Hartwell’s original invitation in 1966.xiii Only a week after Hartwell’s May visit, Avedon pulled the plug on the Minneapolis show, saying it would be “oppressive and unimaginable” to revisit his older work, and expressing insecurity about his portraiture since Nothing Personal. Itching to find a new project, Avedon wrote to Hartwell: “I must put myself on the line now and not look backwards.”

By the summer of 1969, Avedon conceived of a major new portrait project using the Deardorff. Marvin Israel suggested that Avedon develop the nascent project with 24-year-old Doon Arbus, daughter of their mutual friend, photographer Diane Arbus. A freelance writer, Arbus had already collaborated with her mother on several articles. At the end of June, she began visiting Avedon’s home and studio for long planning sessions. As she recalled thirty years later in a recorded conversation with Avedon, the initial concept was his:

You were clear on what you wanted to do. I mean, as clear as things like that can be before you actually start them. It was an emotional thing and also something political. You said to me, when we first met to discuss working on this — kind of apologetically, as I suppose one must — you said you wanted to photograph people who were putting themselves on the line. As it evolved, it got less and less structured by that. But that was the initial thought.

Together they planned a book and an exhibition that would depict, in images and words, key figures of the “Movement.” Their working title was Hard Times — perhaps inspired by a weekly countercultural tabloid of the same title, edited by Andrew Kopkind and James Ridgeway, as well as by Charles Dickens’ “state of the nation” novel Hard Times.

In addition to writing, Arbus would also help identify prospective subjects and arrange portrait sittings. The subjects were to be drawn principally from the ranks of New Left activists, but the roster also included members of the old guard, elder figures whose contributions (past and present) provided the inspiration and intellectual grounding for what was increasingly a youth-dominated movement. At the same time, they decided to include artists, writers, and musicians whose creative work identified them with the cultural shift accompanying the nation’s political upheavals. “A quality of life is what we’re researching, not just the Movement … survival, how people survive and what they consider important to themselves right now,” Avedon told a reporter for The Village Voice.

At this early stage, Avedon had a broad vision of the project’s scope: he was “taking the Movement in the widest sense, not just in the political arena … not only the superstars but also the true moles of the underground.” Avedon planned to travel widely, he told the Voice reporter, to cover radical movements that were flourishing around the globe. With remarkable foresight, Avedon speculated that the outsized nature of the project, and the variety of the Movement itself, would make it “very hard to know when to stop.” To forestall this eventuality, his initial plan allowed for two years of work.

Avedon and Arbus developed a highly collaborative process. In the book, Avedon’s portraits would be paired with first-person narratives that Arbus extracted from interviews with his subjects. These interviews, it was decided, would be conducted by Arbus in Avedon’s studio, often in tandem with the portrait sessions. Years later Arbus recalled that “it was clear to everybody we encountered that the interview was going to happen, and that the photograph was going to happen, and that these two things in some way were going to be together. That it was a way of representing the people, and their passions, and their causes, with words and pictures.”

The photographs and text were initially intended to work in synergy, so that the person depicted in the photograph would seem to be speaking from the pages of the book. It is not known whether Avedon and Arbus were influenced by other photo-text classics, such as Dorothea Lange and Paul Taylor’s An American Exodus: A Record of Human Erosion, which juxtaposed portraits and interview excerpts. “We had no plan,” Avedon recalled later, "just my feeling that I wanted in some way to respond to the demands of the time."

In preparation for the first photo session of Hard Times, set for the last week of July 1969, Avedon took a self-portrait to experiment with lighting, exposure, and poses. Instead of using the gray backdrop and directional lighting of his Warhol portrait, Avedon selected white studio paper and chose flat, even lighting. Posing frontally, he adopted a blank expression and positioned himself off-center within the frame.

On July 31 Avedon began the project, making pictures in the new style. At the suggestion of Diane Arbus, his first subject was writer Renata Adler. When Adler arrived at the studio for her 10 a.m. session, Avedon noted her white shirt and beige corduroy trousers, near-matches for the clothes he had worn while making his test images a few days earlier. He showed her a print of the self-portrait, and then worked with her to make a similarly-styled picture. The resulting portrait, with Adler standing right of center, her hands loosely-clasped below the waist, her lips pressed together and eyes looking off-camera, and her head fragmented at the top negative edge, marked the beginning of Avedon’s signature style.

  Straight away, Avedon sensed something special about his new stylistic approach — an immediacy that derived from a more direct engagement with his subject. As far back as 1959, while making Observations, Avedon bemoaned his isolation behind the camera: “ … I hate cameras. They interfere, they’re always in the way. I wish: if I just could work with my eyes alone!” Using the Deardorff, Avedon was able to forge a different kind of relationship in the act of photographing, one that changed the tenor of the image itself:

With that ancient camera, used by [August] Sander, [Mathew] Brady, and [Eugene] Atget, I could stand next to the lens, facing the subject with nothing between us, in a kind of locked relationship. The large format camera can’t follow anything that moves, so we are both, the subject and I, stuck with the discipline of its limitations. The slightest motion on the part of the subject will throw details out of focus — an eye, or an ear — or destroy the composition entirely. This creates a kind of tension that is part of what I’m looking for. A particular quality of proportion within the frame and a kind of spatial balancing and emotional tone.

Though Avedon had long made his portraiture in the isolating confines of his studio, he now generated a deliberate aesthetic from the elimination of background detail, using a blank white paper roll behind the subject. His new images, he later recalled, were “heavily composed but impossible to put your finger on. It was just the figure, where the figure fell in the white space.” Avedon determined to work with flat, encompassing illumination — usually from studio strobe lights — rejecting the implicit drama of chiaroscuro.

The most significant development in Avedon’s adoption of this new format was not visible in the images themselves. Freed from having to look through his camera’s viewfinder to compose an image, Avedon began to interact more directly with his sitters. He later remembered the discovery:

[I] made the composition with an assistant helping me, and stood right up next to the lens and talked to the person I was photographing. It was an enormous relief compositionally. And an intensity and purity of response, and also the possibility of manipulating that response.

Avedon aimed to shape his portraits from direct interaction with his subjects. After trying different poses with his assistants, taking test shots to examine lighting and framing, and conducting an initial examination through the view camera’s ground glass, Avedon would stand to the side of the camera, face his sitter, and engage him with conversation and gesture. Charming, focused, and sometimes manipulative, he could engender a series of subtle reactions in the facial expression and posture of his subject. Avedon’s collaborator Marvin Israel, describing the origins of Avedon’s 8 x 10 format, characterized it as inherently anti-naturalistic:

[The subjects’] being photographed was not to record their human nature. [Avedon] will attest to the fact that the white paper … is a way to separate the people from their universe, their life. They become isolated and unique celebrations of people. The white paper was something that was an obvious necessity. He had a very simple choice — white paper, grey paper and black paper. Black paper was grim and corny. Grey paper he used for fashion and some portraits and it always created a dichotomy that took away the edge he sought and as a result made it ambiguous. But the white paper really made the person — the edge of their face and the circumstances they existed [in] — that separate and absolutely a map.

From his first such picture, Avedon’s blank environment — a confining, shallow emptiness of white space, rimmed by a hard black line — unmoored the subject. In the words of art historian Dore Ashton, it set subjects adrift “in the artifice of timelessness and spacelessness.” Avedon’s inclusion of black film edges in the final prints and reproductions suggests the formal (and thus fictional) construction of the portrait. And the “map” effect noted by Israel refers to the way Avedon’s aesthetic provokes a peculiar reaction in the viewer, a pressured attention to details of physiognomy, gesture, clothing, and pose. Most viewers, Israel felt, could not help but to “look at the person and make a judgment.”

The day of Adler’s photo session, Avedon also hosted Jeff Shero, Gary Thiher, and Alice Embree, the founding editors of Rat — a New York underground newspaper devoted to radical politics and the counterculture. Avedon photographed the editors separately and close-up; as well as together, full-length, and in conversation. In contrast to his more straightforward frontal representation of Adler, Avedon experimented aggressively with his new style, particularly in his use of figural fragmentation. For many of his exposures he positioned Shero, Thiher, or Embree so that one or more of them stood partly outside the camera frame, visually cropping their bodies at the edges of the picture. Avedon also tested the large camera’s shallow depth of field, displacing marginal figures — unfocused and looming out of the near ground — against the sharply-focused central subject dominating the picture space.

Initially Avedon envisioned Hard Times as a substantial body of work, and during the month of August he worked at a fever-pitch. In 29 sessions he and Arbus photographed and interviewed 37 people. It was not unusual for the studio to host multiple sessions in one day, or to intermix them with commercial shoots. On August 7, for example, Avedon photographed publisher and First Amendment activist Ralph Ginzburg; disc jockeys and producers for left-progressive WBAI Radio; and Julius Lester, civil rights activist, writer, and folksinger. Most of Avedon’s exposures that day have a decidedly informal quality, depicting physical movement, casual poses, overt conversation, and energetic interaction between subjects. Lester, who hosted a program on WBAI, appears with several of the radio station’s DJs, still hanging around the studio after their own portrait session. Many of Lester’s portraits show him mid-conversation — not only with Arbus, who interviewed him, but with others in the room as well.

Outtakes from sessions in August 1969 reveal that Avedon sometimes depicted Doon Arbus in-frame with her microphone, representing her interview process in the photographs. The photographer even included himself during one session, stepping forward into the picture from beside his camera. From these few images it seems clear that in the early stages of Hard Times Avedon toyed with “breaking the fourth wall,” or eliminating the barrier between himself and his subjects. Such a theatrical strategy of alienation would have been familiar to Avedon (a serious theater fan) from Bertolt Brecht’s verfremdungseffekt, or “distancing effect,” and could well have been a provocation to the viewer. Included in the planned book, such disjunctive references to process might have been intended to provide a critical and analytic framework in keeping with the subject matter of political and cultural radicalism.

These explicit references to process never recurred, but Avedon and Arbus continued to visually allude to discourse. Subjects speaking and gesturing — to each other in the frame or to the camera and viewer — became a leitmotif for the project. A close look at all of the sessions leaves little doubt that Avedon and Arbus envisioned a group of talking portraits, with the subjects’ faces and words affecting a kind of direct address to the viewer.

Avedon’s visual evocation of monologue and dialogue was an extraordinarily difficult undertaking, an aesthetically innovative attempt to actualize the spirit of perpetual debate and discussion that characterized New Left radicalism at the time. Even without knowing the context, the effect is evident in the results: Avedon’s portraits for Hard Times are at once naturalistic and alienating, casual but filled with tension.

September-November 1969:
The Chicago Seven
In late September, Avedon and Arbus traveled to Chicago for the beginning of what became known as the Chicago Conspiracy Trial. The case brought together antiwar organizers Rennie Davis, David Dellinger, John Froines, Tom Hayden, Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, Bobby Seale, and Lee Weiner, all of whom were indicted on federal charges of conspiring to cross state lines with the intent “to incite, organize, promote, and encourage” riots at the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

Upon arrival, Avedon and Arbus set up in a room at Chicago’s Conrad Hilton Hotel, site of one of the major protests the previous summer. During their four-day visit they attended the trial, and after evening adjournment they invited the defendants, their lawyers, journalists covering the case, and others to visit their makeshift studio. As in New York, Avedon and Arbus worked together, simultaneously conducting interviews and photographing in front of the photographer’s white backdrop. During these first sessions, it is likely that Avedon and Arbus saw the defendants as more or less analogous to the other New Left activists whose participation they solicited. The excerpts chosen by Arbus from her interviews with Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden, conducted the second and third days of the trial, are dominated by autobiographical reflection and include little reference to the proceedings.

Arbus and Avedon returned to New York on September 27 but continued to follow news of the trial. Protests against the trial made national headlines, particularly the violent “Days of Rage,” staged by the militant Weatherman faction of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in early October. Avedon joined demonstrations in New York as part of the nationwide Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, on October 15; and three days later he hosted Jerry Rubin at his New York studio.

A month into the trial, media reports from the courtroom left little doubt that the activists were being railroaded in a political show trial. Judge Julius Hoffman’s comprehensive bias against the defendants was evidenced by systematic denial of their motions, by the myriad citations he issued for contempt, and by serial violations of their legal and constitutional rights. On October 29, outraged by Bobby Seale’s intensifying demands that he be allowed to represent himself in court, Judge Hoffman ordered the Black Panther leader to be bound and gagged in court. A week later, on November 5, he declared a mistrial in Seale’s case, severing him from the ongoing Conspiracy Trial and sentencing him to four years in prison on multiple counts of contempt. Avedon and Arbus were present for Seale’s mistrial, having returned to Chicago three days earlier.

During this visit, with the trial well underway, Arbus focused some of her interview questions on the ordeal at hand. Excerpts from interviews with Yippie leader Jerry Rubin and courtroom observer Jason Epstein reveal extreme anxiety. “The defendants are under terrible pressure. It’s a terrible time,” Epstein said. Rubin resorted to his signature black humor: “Right now I’m getting more out of the trial than it’s getting out of me. It’s great. It’s perfect. I planned the whole thing, really … I mean just think about it. Wouldn’t you want to be indicted by the government for a high crime?”

Avedon, for his part, conceived a pictorial set piece that would both satirize and dramatize the defendants’ conundrum: their heroic status as conspirator-agitators, accused in a criminal proceeding aimed at suppressing political dissent. Three days into their stay he would make his celebrated group portrait of the Chicago Seven.

It should be noted that group identity fascinated Avedon throughout his work on Hard Times. Between 1969 and 1971 he photographed leading members of the Black Panthers, the Milwaukee 14, the Young Lords Party, GIs United Against the War, the Southern Conference Educational Fund, and the New York Law Commune, among other associations that emerged from the cultural and political upheavals of the period. While many of these photographs have never been published, they are crucial bellwethers in the development of Avedon’s mature portraiture style.

During this period the photographer consistently approached group sessions as opportunities to experiment with figural choreography, spatial organization, and composition. He also seems to have analyzed how group portraits function in narrative terms. One of Avedon’s primary subjects (arising, no doubt, from the environment of spontaneity he fostered in the studio) was naturalistic interaction between two or more individuals, conveyed both by action — usually conversation — and relative body position. Most of his photographic groupings in Chicago follow this model. For example, Avedon depicted defense lawyer William Kunstler in conversation on two occasions, once with fellow attorney Leonard Weinglass, another time with cartoonist Jules Feiffer and writer/editor Jason Epstein. It is easy to imagine these portraits as elements of an extended narrative chronicling the Chicago Conspiracy Trial and, by extension, the whole of the antiwar movement. As individual scenes, these images are often quite unsettling — they combine an apparently casual and unplanned interaction between colleagues with the overt and bewildering absence of a normative, contextualizing location. Avedon also developed a more formal compositional approach during this period, wherein group members stand side-by-side in a row, at full length with heads and feet hard against (or even beyond) the image edge. (Two key examples are his portraits of WBAI Radio staff and officers of the Young Lords Party). Though their bodies relate to one another, they also appear as isolated individuals when set against Avedon’s indeterminate white space. Their most vital relationships are those forged with the viewer: looking impassively at the lens, they seem to project themselves out of their surroundings. Both utterly straightforward and deeply mysterious, these portraits are infused with a rich pictorial tension between the subjects’ collective and solo identities. Their bodies and faces proclaim a contradiction, suggesting both humility and egoism, dependence and detachment.

On November 5, the day Seale was severed from the trial — and the “Chicago Eight” became the “Chicago Seven” — Avedon lined up the accused activists against his white backdrop. He photographed the group in sections, making three exposures with his 8 x 10-inch view camera. In the resulting triptych, Avedon “packed” his subjects into the field of view, using the negative edges to cut off each figure at the head, the feet, or at the sides. Two of the defendants (Hoffman and Rubin) appear twice, the bodies “recurring” between the edges adjoining the frames. Taken separately, the defendants’ postures and facial expressions have a distinctly naturalistic quality; but collectively the men project a covert theatricality.

With the Chicago Seven in the middle of a jury trial, their group portrait can be considered as a pictorial parody of a police lineup. Interpreted this way, our understanding of the portrait’s visual context shifts. The white surround and black negative edges approximate the height measure-lines standard in lineup backdrops, and Avedon’s normative flat lighting seems to become an aid to identification. Several of the “suspect” poses — Tom Hayden’s rigid forward stance and Abbie Hoffman’s heavy-lidded expression, in particular — evoke self-consciousness and embarrassment, reminiscent of Hollywood portrayals of this institutional “law and order” construct.

A police lineup is by nature a visual display designed to aid a victim or witness in the identification of a criminal. It is both a question to the viewer (“do you recognize any of these people as the perpetrator?”) and a powerful suggestion: that all the people on view are under suspicion. Avedon uses this pose to raise important questions: are these people criminals? If so, what is their crime? Recast by the charges against them — their actions, words, appearance, ideology, and resistance defined in terms of an insurrectionary conspiracy — the Chicago Seven become, in this portrayal, more than a group, and more than themselves. Avedon visualizes their predicament as symbolic of the relationship between the Vietnam-era state and its citizens.

Avedon’s aesthetic and conceptual reference to the police lineup is in keeping with a long-standing fascination with vernacular modes of photographic portraiture. When discussing his career with journalists, he often credited the origins of his own portrait work to his service making identity portraits for the United States Merchant Marine during World War II. In 1970, speaking to a reporter, Avedon even credited police mug shots as an important inspiration: “ … I used to go down to the post office and look at the ‘Wanted’ pictures, because that’s where it’s at.”

Avedon left Chicago for the second time on November 7. Back in New York and excited by his work in Chicago, Avedon wrote to John Szarkowski that “the new work is growing in complexity, intensity, pleasure, and working hours.” In the same letter he called the curator’s attention to the current issue of The Village Voice, which included the first public mention of Hard Times as an exhibition project for MoMA.

On February 14 and 15, 1970, Judge Hoffman sentenced the defendants and their attorneys for 159 specific instances of contempt of court, with prison terms totaling 15 years and 5 months. On February 18, the jury returned with their verdict: all the defendants were declared not guilty of conspiracy; Weiner and Froines were cleared outright. Hoffman, Davis, Rubin, Hayden, and Dellinger were found guilty of crossing state lines with the intention of inciting a riot. Two days later, Judge Hoffman sentenced each to five years in prison.

As news emerged of the convictions and sentences, Avedon and Arbus were at the New York studio, continuing their work on the project.

November 1969-July 1970:
Exhibition in Minneapolis
After his earlier bid to cancel his mid-career survey show at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Avedon had a change of heart. Energized by his recent work, he began preparing an exhibition plan for the museum using a scale model of the galleries.

At Avedon’s request, Minneapolis curator Ted Hartwell hired Marvin Israel to design the exhibition and its graphics, and to help with photograph selection and installation. Together they prepared for the show’s summer 1970 opening, in tandem with Avedon’s ongoing work on Hard Times. Planned as a representation of his best work from throughout his career, the Minneapolis exhibition openly reflected the present centrality of politics, social justice, and protest in Avedon’s recent portraiture.

At the end of 1969, the photographer also stepped up the pace of his commercial practice, somewhat diminished in previous months (presumably by choice). On January 22, 1970, following an exhibition planning meeting with Israel, Hartwell, and author John Lahr (then slated to write an essay for the show’s catalog), Avedon left for Paris to photograph the spring collections for Vogue, an annual assignment requiring several weeks of work. Arbus joined him a week later, intent on editing her texts. Avedon’s appointment calendar for the year reads “Complete Project” for several days during and after the Paris sojourn, seemingly indicating their intention to finish a significant stage of their work for Hard Times.

Adding to the frenzy of his schedule, Avedon met John Szarkowski twice on his return from Paris, February 24 and March 5, to start planning an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art of his new work for Hard Times. Szarkowski tentatively scheduled the show a year hence, in Spring 1972. Later Avedon asked if the exhibition could instead open in September or October, saying he needed more time “to deepen and complete the work”: Szarkowski agreed. Perhaps not incidentally, the revised show dates meant the MoMA exhibition would now open right before the presidential election. Avedon asked Szarkowski for a large room, in which he proposed:

… linking one group of people to another in a long single picture. For example, though this will not be it, from Warhol to Ginsburg to Leary to the communes to Kesey to Mailer to Lowell to Sontag to the editors of the New York Review of Books, etc. I’d like them to be blown up life size and to stand in the center of the room — a long frieze with photographs on both sides of the structure so that you can walk around it meeting the people in the photographs eye to eye.

Avedon and Arbus continued work on Hard Times into April 1970, while also stepping up preparations for Minneapolis. Marvin Israel refined the exhibition installation plan and designed an innovative catalogue package, with a four-flap silver wrapper enclosing a staple-bound pamphlet with text, loose gravure reproductions of several photographs, and a fold-out poster checklist. Avedon’s studio and darkroom assistants Gideon Lewin and Sakata Eiichiro began printing the nearly 240 images selected for the show. Avedon tapped the New York lab Modernage to make mural-sized prints of several of his photographs, the largest of his career to date.

Avedon and Israel selected a great variety of imagery, dating from the beginning of the photographer’s career in 1946. In addition to documentary-style photographs of street life in Italy and mental patients of the East Louisiana State Hospital, they included many portraits of artists and cultural figures: poets and playwrights; actors, dancers, and comedians; musicians and composers; painters, architects, and filmmakers; and on and on. Many of his subjects were well-known at the time for their engagement of political and social issues in their professional and personal commitments.

Given Avedon’s concurrent immersion in a project about the counterculture and radical New Left, his choices of such subjects were certainly intentional. He selected most of his civil rights-era portraits from Nothing Personal; and evoked the war, the atomic bomb, humanism, religion, class, and other aspects of politics and power by including photographs of (among others): Hiroshima reconnaissance pilot Claude Eatherly, Reverend Martin Cyril D’Arcy, astronauts John Glenn, Gus Grissom, and Alan Shepard, scientists J. Robert Oppenheimer and Linus Pauling, the Vicomtesse Jacqueline de Ribes and Raymundo de Larrain, U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

Avedon received wide latitude in his choices and unequivocal support for his approach from Hartwell and M.I.A. Director Anthony Clark. As his work on the show progressed, however, the potential for controversy implicit in Avedon’s choices affected the exhibition planning process. In April 1970, Avedon received word from Clark that he had rejected the text written for the catalogue pamphlet by author and theater critic John Lahr.

Lahr’s essay defined Avedon’s work in explicitly sociopolitical terms: “[His] photographs uncover the confusions in an old Establishment, the isolation and pain in the young revolutionaries.” Avedon’s portraits, he wrote, are a “silent theater,” opposing “art and atrocity, poets and psychopaths...[searching] out the ideas which haunt our leaders, our idols, and our victims.” At times Lahr editorialized openly: “...this spiritual and psychic decay clings to modern America like a bad smell”; and “Society masks its neurosis with a compulsive misuse of power.”

Avedon conveyed his dismay over rejection of the essay in a letter to Lahr: “If [Clark] doesn’t want to publish it, I guess that’s his prerogative, and I have my private feelings as to why not … I think the view of the essay is too rough for the trustees of the museum who are, after all, what the photographs are about.” At this late stage Avedon opted to write the pamphlet text himself rather than find a new author. He asked the museum director to make the opening event a charitable benefit for the antiwar movement, or for another social cause such as welfare relief or Native American rights. Clark replied, with some edge: “The opening of the exhibition will certainly be in benefit of some Minneapolis charity, namely this art museum.”

In early May, with the encouragement of Hartwell, Avedon decided to conclude the exhibition with his portraits of the Chicago Seven. This late decision invigorated the photographer. Two months from the exhibition’s opening date, Avedon altered the installation, deleting a slide show of his fashion work originally planned for the last room. Working with Israel, he reshaped the exhibition narrative to conclude with larger-than-life-size solo portraits of each of the seven defendants, along with an eight-foot-tall mural print of his three-frame group portrait. Arbus edited a compilation recording of her interviews with the Chicago Seven, so that their voices could be played in the gallery.

Avedon’s newfound enthusiasm is evident in a letter to Clark: “My final complete involvement with the show came with the decision to use the new work in the last room. It keeps the show alive for me.” In order to contextualize the late addition for museum audiences, Avedon wrote a new text for the catalogue package, to be included as a one-sheet glassine insert. Departing dramatically from the epigrammatic tone of his more general pamphlet text, he wrote:

The photographs in the last room of the exhibition were added at the final \moment and, as a result, could not be included in this catalogue. They were taken in Chicago last October [sic] during the Conspiracy Trial. It was my original intention not to show them for another two years as they are, in a sense, rough sketches for a future exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

In a statement written by the defendants following the verdict in the case, they said, “Everyone who opposes the war in Vietnam — and everyone who advocates the liberation of black people — everyone with long hair and a free spirit — everyone who condemns the existence of poverty here and throughout the world — all have been found guilty by this verdict.”

The defendants were convicted of crossing state lines with intent to incite a riot and of delivering inflammatory speeches. They are facing prison terms pending appeal.

In the light of the verdict and of present conditions in the country, I feel that the photographs I took of these seven men belong to this moment and should be seen now.

At the end of June, Avedon, Israel, Arbus, and studio assistants Gideon Lewin and Larry Hales flew to Minneapolis to install the show. Through fierce summer heat and with no air conditioning in the museum, Israel directed the complex installation, freely moving the framed photographs from wall to wall in search of effective pairings. Friends and family arrived from New York to lend support at the July 1 opening night event, including Avedon’s wife Evelyn, his parents, employees Ginny Heyman, Laura Kanelous, and Harry Mattison, fellow photographers Diane Arbus and Hiro (a former assistant), lawyer Henry Aronson, Harper’s Bazaar art director Ruth Ansel, art director Henry Wolf, and hairstylist Ara Gallant.

The opening event was festive, enlivened by the presence of many Minneapolis teenagers whom Avedon personally invited. Photographs taken that evening show an impromptu political rally that emerged in the Chicago Seven gallery; one local woman sparked an enthusiastic group singalong of God Bless America, The Star-Spangled Banner and America the Beautiful. Avedon’s decision to involve elements of the local counterculture fascinated a local society columnist. After interviewing the artist, she wrote: “He is very interested in youth, what it is doing, the spirit, drive and hang-ups that separate them from the older generation.” She further noted that while some museum patrons grew irritated by the unexpected culture clash, others were charmed.

Local reviews were almost entirely positive, and several commented on the political orientation of the show. Avedon told a television reporter from Minneapolis’ CBS affiliate that “the seven galleries represent his early interest in theater and his later awareness of his social conscience, his concern for those around him.” One writer noted that the exhibition installation:

… carefully worked out [the] social commentary. Billy Graham and George Wallace hang side-by-side (their faces unforgettable, vulgar, similar), the big Ginsburg and Orlovsky lovers hang by calculation so they can’t be overlooked, and room after room of massive photographs of dignitaries who may never have met in life hang so they can look into one another’s eyes.”

Israel’s installation design included walls painted in reflective silver through the first six galleries: the portraits, one critic wrote, “seem to bob and float as in a sea of phosphorous.” Museum personnel lit the walls evenly, and a stereo system played music by Vivaldi. The photographs ranged dramatically in scale from less than ten inches in height to nearly five feet tall. Most were trimmed to the edge, mounted on masonite, and framed with aluminum section molding.

Avedon and Israel organized the rooms around visual and thematic groupings, each connected by large prints that created dramatic sightlines through the gallery doorways. The layout owed much to the dynamic aesthetics of magazine page spreads: unsurprising, given the men’s experience in the editorial world. Avedon described the show’s progression to a reporter: “… if you look closely at each room — and this isn’t done consciously, it just happened — you find a photograph that is the precursor of what comes in the next room, and then it gets developed stylistically and in intensity.” In Avedon’s words, the sequence conveys a “logical undercurrent of feeling,” leading from theatricality, in his early portraits of entertainers, to an impression of tragedy, sadness, and insanity in his work from the mid-1960s. From local newspaper reviews it is evident that the exhibition’s purposeful sequence and careful image juxtapositions held great power for viewers.

The seventh and final gallery, devoted to large scale photographs of the Chicago Seven, was cordoned off by a dark curtain, and was painted and carpeted entirely in black. Outside the entrance, Avedon positioned a wall label with the statement he wrote for the catalogue insert. Inside, instead of Vivaldi, speakers played the voices of the trial defendants. The photographs, dramatically spot-lit, were installed unframed, and mounted on sheets of linen with the rough fabric edges visible. Avedon chose to simply tack them with staples at the top edges, letting them drape down the wall. A label named and categorized the defendants:

David Dellinger — Pacifist

Tom Hayden — Revolutionary

Rennie Davis — Revolutionary

Abbie Hoffman — Yippie

Jerry Rubin — Yippie

John Froines — Academic Radical

Lee Weiner — Academic Radical

Critics and audiences alike were riveted by the topicality and the drama of this presentation. Minneapolis Star writer Richard Gibson and New York Times critic Gene Thornton both noted the group portrait’s resemblance to a police lineup. Thornton, whose reaction was mixed, was impressed enough to declare the final room “a stunning coup de theater.” He was, however, taken aback by the attraction it held — well after the opening — for the “various fringed, beaded, sandaled members of Minneapolis’s counterculture, who made this particular gallery into a kind of temple of the True Faith.”

When interviewed in association with the Minneapolis show, Avedon attempted to contextualize his new work. He was unusually expansive in discussion with Connie Goldman, a radio presenter who interviewed Avedon in July 1970. His explication, reprinted below at length, reveals much about the complexity of his motivations and the intensity of his passions:

With the beginning of the civil rights movement in Atlanta, I think a lot of people became more active. I think we were all aware of the crimes against the Black people in this country, and we were all aware of the questions of poverty... But it began...with those freedom marches and the children who began to start their crusade. I was among the others who began to feel that it was time to turn their energies and work directly toward helping; and I, at least at that time, did a book with text by James Baldwin … called Nothing Personal.

And that was when I began to photograph political figures. People in politics — Malcolm X, Governor Wallace, Eisenhower, the young Black students in the South, the mental institution. And my interests have been more political, at least on the surface in the way — I think when you think of photography (at least mine) you have to think of two things at the same time. On the surface, there’s what the people do. I mean, they’re in politics, or they’re in the theater, or they’re in the arts. And then, underneath, there’s that old river that has nothing to do with what they do.

But on the surface … the new work that I am doing seems to be about the Movement in this country — [and] I don’t think it’s about that at all. I have to tell myself stories about what I’m doing to get me doing it. This new body of work started out to be portraits of people of courage — and the more I called it that, the more the word stuck in my throat, because courage is a very complicated thing. And it really has nothing to do with what I’m photographing.

But part of the new project brought me to Chicago during the Conspiracy Trial. And I did many portraits there of the seven men being tried for conspiracy.

...I consider the seven defendants to be heroic men in that they’re doing for all of us what we should be doing. Or should have done a long time ago ...These men are putting their lives on the line. They work in different ways, it’s easy to group them as one — they’re not. They believe in very different things, they’re very different men. But they’re all working towards a common goal, and the goal is to make the country America. I’m ashamed — with my family, my son — that I wasn’t more active in the last 25 years, in trying not to hand him this mess. And I don’t think I did enough, I don’t think any of us did enough. I think we just had a lot of good times on someone else’s trouble.

August 1970-March 1971:
Hard Times in Crisis
By all accounts the Minneapolis exhibition was a significant success for Avedon. In September, shortly after closing, the photographer learned that the exhibition had drawn 34,911 visitors in 53 days, a substantial audience for the Minneapolis Institute at the time. Avedon retained warm feelings for the museum, for the exhibition, and for Ted Hartwell throughout his career. Despite the show’s success, however, Avedon’s doubts about Hard Times had grown paramount.

As the project evolved through 1970, Avedon and Arbus selected their subjects more carefully, photographing and interviewing substantially fewer people than in 1969. According to his studio calendars, Avedon made few portraits in the intervals before and after the exhibition in Minneapolis. Between February and October of that year, Avedon conducted sessions with academic and antiwar activist Noam Chomsky; psychiatrist and electroshock therapy pioneer Dr. Lothar Kalinowsky; writer Jean Genet and Black Panther Party leaders Ray “Masai” Hewitt and Zayd Malik Shakur; poet Allen Ginsburg and his family; literary critic and activist Edmund Wilson; Abbie Hoffman with Marty Kenner and Brenda Hysen; Andy Warhol; New York City mayor John Lindsay; lawyer Henry Aronson; artist Susan Brockman; filmmaker Werner Herzog; Fred Gardner, leader of the G.I. Coffeehouse movement; singer-actress Lotte Lenya; Gerry Lefcourt and the New York Law Commune; actress Jeanne Moreau; and philosopher Herbert Marcuse.

Given their earlier productivity, Avedon and Arbus’ work on Hard Times in 1970 seems meager. Avedon’s attention was divided throughout this year, principally by the show in Minneapolis but also by fashion sessions for Vogue magazine and advertising work for a variety of clients.

It is unclear when Avedon began to feel unsure about his work on Hard Times. But uncertainties about the project surface in a letter dated April 23, 1970 to John Szarkowski wherein Avedon thanks him for his willingness to delay the MoMA show as requested. “It seems that everything I say and do one month reverses itself a month later,” Avedon explained as his reason for needing more time. “I keep making up disciplines that serve only to keep me working, and I discard them as soon as I use them all up — (all of those rules about the size of the pictures, the necessity of not editing them, even, what the photographs are supposed to be about).”

In October, Avedon expressed mounting frustration with his recent progress on Hard Times during a telephone conversation with his son John:

Richard Avedon: … And I’ve been kind of — I’ve had a lot of trouble getting back into the project. The pictures aren’t any good — the new ones.

Johnny Avedon: But you’ve been doing it?

RA: I’m trying, yeah... But I don’t feel like I’m onto anything.

JA: Does that... I don’t know. Does it really bother you when you can’t get into it?

RA: Terrible.

JA: Yeah, I know.

RA: Are you kidding? It just drives me off the wall. I don’t know what to do. And I’m just hoping — you know — now, if I make myself do things, even if I’m not feeling them, something will come out of it, better than just sitting and not doing it. Both of us are absolutely [inaudible]. Doon and I.

Avedon still felt blocked a month later, with only four sittings in the intervening weeks: “… and Doon and I are crazy because we can’t figure what step to go in next.”

In fact, late that month, Avedon and Arbus diverted their energies to another project that grew out of their current interests in counterculture. After seeing an experimental theatrical adaptation of Alice in Wonderland, Avedon was driven to collaborate with the creators, the cooperative Manhattan Project, led by director Andre Gregory. He began obsessively photographing the troupe’s production, and eventually in 1973 produced the book Alice in Wonderland: The Forming of a Company and the Making of a Play, with text by Arbus.

One can only speculate about the source of Avedon’s frustrations. Close friends knew him to be extraordinarily self-critical at intervals, and his appraisal of his own work was subject to drastic shifts in opinion. He may simply have been insecure about his new photographic style — a radically original approach to portraiture, for him and for the medium.

But during several telephone conversations with his son John in late 1970 (then completing an open school project in Ennis, Montana), he seemed to indicate a different kind of ambivalence — a painful uncertainty about his subject, and about the direction of the project.

Avedon’s initial fascination with radical youth culture appeared to waver — he was experiencing a pronounced realism regarding the limitations of political engagement. In retrospect, it is now clear that Avedon had been photographing the Movement during a moment of profound crisis in 1969 and 1970. The “late New Left,” in the words of Todd Gitlin, was beset by a “growing hatred among the competing factions with their competing imaginations” during these years.

Alongside Avedon’s realism, a nurturing idealism persisted. He repeatedly urged his son to read The New Yorker’s excerpt publication of Charles Reich’s landmark social critique and paean to the counterculture, The Greening of America. Avedon sent the article to his son shortly after its appearance in the September 26th issue, saying: “it’s a terrifically clear and marvelously written piece. And builds to a tremendously optimistic end — I think. I wonder if you agree with it. And it’s a point of view that I share.” The essay, largely forgotten now, became enormously popular when published in book form by Random House later the same year.

Reich’s essay provoked much debate among intellectuals and New Left activists, particularly its assertion that a non-violent, cultural evolution of consciousness precluded the increasingly militant radicalism emergent at the end of the 1960s.

No political revolution is possible in the United States, but no such revolution is needed.

… More and more groups are resorting to militancy, experiencing repression, and becoming radical in their turn. But the breakdown of the corporate state and the growth of radicalism would still lead nowhere, would still justify only despair, if there were not a new vision. It is the power of the vision that can turn hope into reality.

In The Greening, Reich asserted that this vision of change was already in existence, and that it “originated with the individual and culture … This is a revolution of the new generation.” He heralded the music, fashion, and divergent lifestyles evident in the counterculture, and the then- popular “back to nature” movement. These and other aspects of youth culture, which he termed “Consciousness III,” were destined to change society for the better in a way not possible through radical political engagement alone.

It is easy to see why Reich’s interpretation of the counterculture appealed strongly to Avedon, who often explored the passion and transformative insight of artists and performers in his photography. The Greening of America also parallels the artist’s stated motivations for undertaking Hard Times: curiosity about the energy, idealism and courage of radicalized youth during a time of war. Given Avedon’s advocacy of the book in the same conversations with his son wherein he expressed frustration with his work and with contemporary political realities, it is likely that the photographer was at least sympathetic to Reich’s disillusionment with New Left militancy. Given this, it is interesting to note that Avedon’s portraiture broke decisively from representation of political radicals during this crisis period in the fall of 1970. After photographing Herbert Marcuse on October 13, Avedon turned his camera almost exclusively to countercultural artists and performers for the rest of the year and into 1971.

Avedon returned to the subject of young American radicals in February, when he and his son attended the Student and Youth Conference on a People’s Peace in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Avedon focused his lens primarily on groups: Rennie Davis with the Washington Commune, the Indiana-based Raintree Tribe, and a group of Hare Krishnas with journalist Toby Mamis. Later that month, he photographed members of the Young Lords in his New York studio, making one of his more memorable group pictures.

Whether or not Avedon’s impasse resulted from disillusionment with his subject, or confusion about his motivations or the direction of the project, these two events marked the end of his documentation of the American New Left. By March 1971, Avedon had decided to continue his work for Hard Times in Vietnam.

March-April 1971: Vietnam
Avedon likely first contemplated a trip to Vietnam by October 1970, by which time he had begun researching the country and the war. In the months leading up to departure, he continued his self-education though, by his own bemused admission, he was often confused about the details: “[I] repeatedly had to ask [my agent] Laura Kanelous who [President Nguyen Van] Thieu was and who [Prime Minister Nguyen Cao] Ky was.”

The first two months of 1971 were dominated by commercial assignments unrelated to Hard Times, but Avedon had begun his preparations for the trip by March. A trip such as this, with its risks and logistical challenges, was only possible because of Avedon’s success; his advertising work allowed him to conceive and undertake projects on a scale far beyond the reach of most photographers. He often joked that his studio practice had “made it possible for me to be my own Ford Foundation, my own Guggenheim.”

Avedon’s two senior assistants, Peter Waldman and Gideon Lewin, were working guest nationals from the United Kingdom, and visa restrictions prevented them from accompanying him. So Avedon’s young technical assistant Larry Hales prepared to go in their stead. Hales, who had just received conscientious objector status from the United States Selective Service System, was excited to join Avedon. Years after their trip, he sent a notebook of photographs and memories to Avedon, saying, “The attraction of working with you on this assignment was great. For me it was an opportunity for an adventure, a first hand look at war and a way to visit Asia, my emerging passion.” Hales’ memoir of images, recollections, and excerpts from his diaries and letters home is an invaluable record of Avedon’s experience in Vietnam, the primary source for what follows.

A flurry of activity preceded the late March departure date. Avedon visited his father in Sarasota and continued work on his planned book about Andre Gregory’s production of Alice in Wonderland. He and his team packed his equipment, including Rolleiflex twin-lens cameras along with his Deardorff 8 x 10 and a large quantity of film. On March 24, Avedon wrote to John Szarkowski: “Just a note to say goodbye for the moment. I leave tomorrow morning for Vietnam and more work for our show. I’ll be gone about a month and will call you when I get back.” The next morning Avedon and Hales flew to Vietnam via Tokyo.

At the time of their arrival, bad news from the war zone seemed at a peak. Faced with waning public support for the war, President Richard Nixon had announced major troop withdrawals. U.S. and South Vietnamese forces were defeated in a series of brutal engagements between Danang and Khe Sanh near the border of Laos. And news accounts reported the conviction of Lt. William Calley Jr. for 22 murders in the infamous 1968 massacre at the village of My Lai.

Arriving in Saigon, Avedon and Hales found their equipment held up by Vietnamese customs. They checked into their rooms at the Hotel Continental Palace, a legendary century-old hotel favored by western journalists reporting on the war. Without his equipment, Avedon could not begin photographing, and so he and Hales occupied themselves getting to know the city between frustrated efforts to retrieve their cameras, film, tripods, and other material.

Saigon seems to be a safe place. No incidents have occurred since we have been here. Across from my balcony is the Vietnamese legislature in the old French opera house and it’s perpetually surrounded by Vietnamese soldiers with M-16 rifles. Barbed wire is everywhere or coiled up on street corners for ready use. General traffic points are fortified with pillboxes and soldiers with arms are always about. Really, it isn’t as bad as it may sound because within all this the civilians are carrying on their daily business.

On March 29, Avedon and Hales received visa extensions and applied for in-country press accreditation; two days later they received their Department of Defense identification cards, which listed each as a “USA Correspondent.” While enduring the increasingly agonizing wait for their equipment, they met and befriended news correspondents from Time and LIFE magazines, The New York Times, and The Village Voice. Avedon set up his hotel room desk and the surrounding wall as a work space.

“Things get rough around here,” wrote Hales, “there are big lags of nothing to do without our equipment.” During this first week, they spent long afternoon hours in the hotel’s famous patio bar facing Tu Do Street:

The local expats refer to the bar as “The Veranda” and we are told that it is the place in Saigon for spies and intrigues of all kinds. It has high white walls, vaulted ceilings with large fans that provide a cool breeze as we sit in wicker chairs sipping gin and tonics in the late afternoon. This is a stage set out of Humphrey Bogart’s Casablanca. Every café and bar in Saigon has been fragged by passing motorbikes or bombed by VC terrorists except The Veranda at the Continental Palace where the military, businessmen and suspicious sit, drink, and look at each other from the corners of their eyes. One week into his stay, Avedon still did not have his equipment, despite multiple efforts to retrieve it:

Unheard of amounts of paperwork are required to get anything done and to move things from place to place. To get our equipment we must coordinate the U.S. military, the U.S. embassy, Vietnamese customs and Pan American Airlines! It appears, if you can believe, we will need to send a telex wire back to New York to start the paperwork from the beginning.

Finally, the morning of Saturday April 3, the photography equipment was released from customs. Before he began photographing, Avedon worked to line up subjects. Among other efforts, he sought advice and contacts from some of the journalists and other hotel residents they met during their first week. Avedon arrived in Saigon with some leads gleaned from his friend Henry Aronson, who had recently opened a law practice in Saigon called the Lawyer’s Military Defense Committee (L.M.D.C.), to provide civilian defense for court-martialed American soldiers. Over time and throughout his stay, Avedon developed and utilized new connections to find portrait subjects.

While Avedon prepared for the first portrait sessions, Hales set up the makeshift studio in his high-ceilinged quarters at the Continental Palace. He draped a sheet of white paper from a wall, running it along the tiled floor to the camera, so that subjects could be photographed at full length. He set up a weighted boom stand with tripod legs, extended to suspend a strobe and umbrella reflector above the subjects, and fill lights to illuminate the white backdrop. Avedon worked his new connections to find a temporary assistant: Ted Thai, son of a local Time-Life employee.

On April 6, Hales tested Avedon’s Deardorff, lens, and film to make certain no damage had transpired while the equipment was stuck in customs. LIFE photographer Mark Godfrey posed for several test exposures and allowed Hales to use his makeshift darkroom, set up in his own hotel bathroom, to process the film. To Avedon’s relief, the tests were successful. Two days later, he began to make portraits.

The photographer immediately made up for lost time. From Thursday, April 8 through Sunday, April 11, Avedon hosted 13 portrait sittings. While he made some individual photographs during this first phase of the trip, documenting local student antiwar activists and two leading members of South Vietnamese parliamentary opposition parties, he mainly concentrated on producing group portraits.

Avedon portrayed two gatherings of media representatives in animated conversation: one included Robert Shaplen, Asia correspondent for The New Yorker; Cao Giao and Nguyen Hung Vuong, Newsweek correspondents; Pham Xuan An, correspondent for Time; and Nguyen Dinh Tu, a writer for Saigon’s Chin Luan newspaper. For the other, Avedon gathered the Saigon bureau chiefs of four American media outlets, including Peter Jay of The Washington Post, Alvin Shuster of The New York Times, Jonathan Larsen of Time, and Kevin Buckley of Newsweek.

As with his portraiture of U.S. antiwar activists, some of the sessions failed to yield interesting results, and never made it beyond the proofing (or “work print”) stage. Photographs of four military police from the 716th MP Battalion, standing in a tense line, as well as portraits of two antiwar candidates for the National Assembly and a session with Jerry Berge and To Kim Hoa of the Committee of Responsibility were all deemed unsuccessful.

Some of the most compelling portraits of the first four days were group shots of civilian victims of the war. On April 9, he photographed freelance journalist Richard Hughes in a line-up with young beneficiaries of a charity he founded, the Shoeshine Project. Hales’ field notes and the negatives indicate that Avedon considered making this a triptych — a three-frame continuous image in the manner of the Chicago Seven group portrait — to extend the group of children surrounding Hughes. Two days later, with the help of antiwar activist Don Luce, he photographed “Tiger Cage” victims from the Con Son Island prison, the notorious facility where dissidents were kept in underground cages and tortured by U.S.-trained South Vietnamese interrogators. Avedon portrayed the prisoners’ patchwork clothing and signs of their physical distress (a walking stick, a damaged eye) with exacting minimalism, barely alluding to their ordeal in his startlingly unsentimental portrait.

On April 12 or 13, Avedon and Hales embarked on the first of two trips away from Saigon. In this case, they traveled into the Mekong Delta to photograph the religious mystic Dao-Dua, known as the “Coconut Monk.” Born Nguyen Thanh Nam and educated in France as an engineer, Dao-Dua’s pacifism and mixture of Buddhist and Christian philosophies had drawn thousands of followers — many of them army deserters from both South and North Vietnam — and enraged the South Vietnamese leadership. Journalist John Steinbeck IV, whom Avedon befriended shortly after his arrival, acted as a guide to Dao-Dua’s floating complex near Phoenix Island.

Arriving on a hot day, Avedon and Hales settled in the followers’ dormitory and were fitted for robes, which they would wear throughout their stay.

After we arrived on Phoenix Island I was immediately impressed by the monks’ fascination with photography and religious symbols. They were keenly aware of the power of image, acting as iconographers for the Coconut Monk by documenting his ceremonial activities, the people he met, the Taoist, Buddhist and Christian symbols on the island. The monks were known for beating expended battlefield artillery shell casings into shiny temple bells. Each day the Coconut Monk did walking meditation across a large contour map of a unified south and north Vietnam, a Stations of the Cross for his country. Flowering lotuses were enshrouded in barbwire.

Hales remembers the brief trip as extraordinary, but punctuated by drama and frustration. Though the warring armies avoided Dao-Dua’s compound, Avedon and Hales could hear gunfire across the water and saw tracers and perimeter flares at night. Hales suffered from dysentery and worked through vomiting and diarrhea. Downpours interrupted the afternoons, and humidity posed a significant challenge to the camera and electronics. Steinbeck suffered through the early stages of withdrawal from heroin addiction. Finally, the morning of April 14, Avedon lost his eyeglasses in the rushing waters of the Mekong.

Using a large upstairs room of the compound’s pagoda, Avedon and Hales set up the Deardorff and prepared the paper, lights, and 110-volt power packs. Steinbeck, who had a similar prescription, generously loaned his eyeglasses to Avedon for the remainder of the trip, enabling him to photograph. As evening came, Dao-Dua and his monks gathered for the session.

Each time the strobes fired the house and entire pagoda went brown or totally dark. The strain of a distant generator could be heard as it chugged up to “normal” and the house lights pulsated back to their normal glow. The power packs signaled a weak charge and Dick made another image. The monk’s translator was asked, could something be done? Yes, they would turn off some of the pagoda lights. It worked better.

The next morning, everyone returned to Saigon after a warm sendoff.

The following nine days, between April 15 and April 23, were spent photographing at the hotel. Many of the sessions were reshoots of subjects he had already photographed. His work in Vietnam included a surprising number of second attempts, perhaps indicating a growing insecurity about the portraits he was making.

During this time, Avedon used a gray background as a grim counterpoint during a few key portrait sessions. After adopting his new approach with the 8 x 10 Deardorff in the summer of 1969, only rarely did his portraits feature backgrounds that were not white: for example, in his portraits of Janis Joplin and Andy Warhol displaying the scars from his gunshot wounds. “I only used gray when its Victorian romanticism conflicted with the subject matter,” he told curator Jane Livingston years later. 

Just after his return from photographing Dao-Dua, Avedon made a portrait of Lieutenant Joe Hooper, then on an Army public relations visit to the country where he had completed two tours of duty. Winner of the Medal of Honor and 36 other commendations, Hooper was the most decorated American soldier of the war. Reducing the light on his white backdrop, Avedon underexposed its value to middle gray, providing vivid contrast to Hooper’s shark-eating grin. Avedon also used gray to underline the haunted face of Louise Stone, widow of missing (and presumed dead) photojournalist Dana Stone. And he experimented with both gray and white backdrops while photographing local victims of the war: two women who had been badly burnt — one, Avedon was told, from napalm. The gray makes for a markedly more dramatic background, providing an ironic, horrific surround to their disfigurement.

As one who is addicted to white background, it seems odd to me that a gray or tonal background is never described as an empty background. But in a sense, that’s correct. A dark background fills. A white background empties. A gray background does seem to refer to something — a sky, a wall, some atmosphere of comfort and reassurance — that a white background doesn’t permit. With the tonal background, you’re allowed the romance of a face coming out of the dark.

On Saturday, April 24, Avedon and Hales left Saigon to photograph soldiers in the field, with the guidance of Gloria Emerson and Denis Cameron. Their military press passes allowed them to fly freely on army transport, even giving them priority over soldiers below the rank of major. Boarding a C-130 turboprop transport jet at Tan Son Nhut Air Base, they strapped themselves to seat harnesses for the three-stage flight they had arranged north: first to Pleiku, then to Da Nang, and finally to Phu Bai, a military transfer point about 50 miles below the demilitarized zone (DMZ) at the North Vietnamese border. The descent into Pleiku, Hales remembers, was steep and fast to avoid any hostile fire.

In Phu Bai, with daylight left after their long flight, an Army information officer steered them onto a helicopter flight to a firebase near the old capital city of Hue. Looking out the open doors of the chopper, the team saw a landscape heavily cratered from bombardment. They arrived to the deafening sound of artillery fire:

When we arrived at the firebase it was obvious that they were ready for a “scam the press” event. The officers were all scrubbed up and in crisp field uniforms. The GI’s seemed showered and relaxed with some drinking cans of beer as they fired their howitzers and heavy artillery to hold back enemy movements 5-8 miles away. Although the firebase perimeter looked like it was the middle of hell we knew that we had been set up …

With their experience, Emerson and Cameron quickly intuited what had happened. Avedon politely informed the commander that the firebase wouldn’t meet his needs, and they reboarded the helicopter, flying this time to Camp Eagle, the massive home base for the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division. That night, Avedon bunked in a tent (soldiers’ quarters), and Hales on a bench outdoors. Overhead choppers, illumination flares, the flash of distant explosions, and “a mysterious clacking sound” interrupted their sleep through the night.

The next morning, Avedon went looking for soldiers to photograph. Traveling with Cameron, he took a chopper to Firebase Gladiator, in an exposed, blast-pocked hilltop area surrounded by dense foliage. Back at Camp Eagle, Hales prepared a makeshift studio against an outbuilding, securing white sheets with rope and stones to make the backdrop. He suspended another sheet overhead as a light-filtering canopy. Avedon returned midday with three GI’s, exhausted from a three-day patrol. They had, he later said, “something in their eyes.” Hales noted that they looked “tired and strung out.” Holding their weapons, they posed one at a time. Nearby, Emerson interviewed them between exposures, but ran afoul of a military press officer for asking, in his words, “political-type questions.”

Shortly after, in a rare admission of his feelings toward a subject, Avedon shared his initial attitude about the session with Emerson:

I just felt rage seeing them there like that, in that place. I feel only rage toward young men who allow themselves to be put in that position without any idea of what they’re doing and why they are doing it. This is the punishment for mindlessness. And the punishment can be their lives.

Hales notes throughout his journal entries and subsequent recollections the isolation, the feeling of being reviled as outsiders, and the atmosphere of violence. Avedon’s trip to Vietnam, particularly his forays into the field, must have been a strange spectacle for his subjects: a westerner who voluntarily entered a war zone — a slight figure with thick hair, glasses, and high energy — standing next to a view camera like the kind used to document the American Civil War.

Their two-day journey over, Avedon and Hales returned to Saigon that evening. While Emerson accompanied them, Cameron stayed behind to retrieve some of his equipment, returning to Saigon on his own. Hales later found out that Camp Eagle was hit hard with incoming fire the day after they left.

Avedon completed his remaining sessions — reshoots with Aronson, Steinbeck, and Dick Hughes — and made one more photograph using physical debility as a metaphor for the war. Avedon often conceived specific images in advance, envisioning a symbolic correlative for ideas he wanted to convey; he would then conduct his search for a subject as though casting a role in a play.

Dick became fascinated by the idea of photographing a leper, perhaps as a metaphor for the war. I thought the prospect was interesting because of the Bible stories of its terrible scourge, people running away and lepers being stoned … The day came and Dick went with an interpreter in a taxi to a leper colony in Saigon while I prepared the studio. We all knew that the Hotel Continental Palace and its guests would frown on Dick bringing a leper to visit. So Dick took a long rain coat, a broad fedora and big sun glasses for the unfortunate gentleman, a previous tailor as I recall, to wear upon his entry. Word was quietly spread to the hotel staff that Avedon was entertaining a very important, influential guest who required total anonymity. The taxi arrived and the tailor was whisked by Dick up to our studio for interview and photos.

With directional lighting that haloed his subject’s ulcerated face, lesioned and skeletal torso, and disfigured arm in shadow, Avedon made his portrait of Ly Sanh exceptionally graphic. He avoided lighting the background, rendering it gray rather than white.

Avedon’s final session produced one of the most significant portraits of his career. On April 28, in a secure area on the third floor of the American Embassy in Saigon, he and Hales constructed a makeshift studio to photograph the leading officials of the U.S. mission in Vietnam. Collectively referred to as the Mission Council, this group had coordinated American policy and programs in country since 1964. Avedon began planning this portrait session in advance of his trip: artistically, it was his principal motivation for coming.

The Council, established by former Ambassador Maxwell Taylor in July 1964 after his appointment to Vietnam by President Lyndon Johnson, met regularly to coordinate their efforts and manage relations with the South Vietnamese government. The group included the American ambassador, his deputy, the embassy’s political and economic counselors, and the heads of other State Department and U.S. Military Assistance Command (US-MACV) agencies — most prominently, the military commander overseeing U.S. operations.

In order to realize the portrait as he envisioned it, Avedon constructed a five-panel polyptych centered on military leader General Creighton Abrams Jr. and Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker. Flanking them were two important embassy figures: George D. Jacobson, assistant chief of staff, Civil Operations and Rural Development Support (CORDS), the military’s pacification program aimed at winning the “hearts and minds” of the Vietnamese; and Deputy Ambassador Samuel D. Berger (known colloquially by his nickname, “Silent Sam”).

Akin to his portrait of the Chicago Seven, Avedon segmented bodies along the edges of the frames. He then planned the remainder of the portrait to frame the central panel, a heraldic conceit wherein the other subjects “radiated out” from the principals. Two panels appear to either side, for a total of five; in each, a central figure is flanked by two others. As with the middle panel, the figures at the sides are only partially present: their bodies are divided, appearing twice in the portrait across the frame line.

Conspicuously absent was Theodore Shackley, the notorious Central Intelligence Agency Station Chief for Vietnam, involved in a number of controversial covert operations from the 1960s and 1970s. Though invited to participate in the portrait session, Shackley arrived only to announce that he “had to go to a meeting.” Known within the C.I.A. by the nickname “Blond Ghost,” Shackley was famously averse to being photographed and obviously did not want to be part of the portrait. To mark Shackley’s absence in the picture, Avedon left a gap in the far right frame.

Because Avedon photographed each frame separately, participants watched as they waited their turn. They had been allotted little time to make the portraits, and he later remembered the session as taking only 15 minutes. For this reason, advance planning of the session was crucial.

There are no accidents in this photograph. Everything was planned. Beforehand I had made a drawing. I got the height of each man, and since I don’t crop my photographs, I had to map out the picture with the height of the tallest man as my starting point. They are arranged in order of their rank and authority. This was meant to be as correct a photograph as it could possibly be.

Avedon arrived at the portrait session with the image mapped out in a rough, multipanel sketch on sheets of legal paper, indicating each man’s position. He later recalled that he pinned the sketch to the wall at the embassy as a guide.

The following day, Hales recorded the event in his journal:

General Abrams arrived exactly on time landing his chopper on the roof. Dick photographed the American Mission Council in a police line-up in the same way as he photographed the Chicago Seven. Abrams and Ambassador Bunker stood together as friends with co-workers on each side. Abrams and Bunker laugh over others in the photograph being “split.” I was amazed to see Dick put these stiff officials at ease … Now Dick has completed the spectrum from the Chicago Seven protest leaders to the Council running the war. Despite Hales’ contemporaneous recognition of the photograph’s conceptual schema,

Avedon later disclaimed any such intention on his part. In the coming years, however, his group picture would become known precisely for its resemblance to a police lineup. As the war drew to an end in April 1975, just prior to the final evacuation of the American Embassy, The New York Times published Avedon’s portrait of the Mission Council in its editorial section — the picture’s first appearance in print — accompanied by Gloria Emerson’s trenchant critique of the men who posed for it. “I have been thinking about these men in the last few weeks,” she wrote, “I wonder if their dreams are dark and ugly things, if any of them trembled and turned away from the television films of Vietnamese refugees weeping, pleading, talking to themselves.” Writer Owen Edwards, one of many critics struck by the Times’ publication of the image, called it “a look through the side door at something more insidious than war … a terrifying picture of business as usual.”

“I know these men,” Avedon said a few years later while talking to Japanese students in Tokyo:

Those are the men who work on Madison Avenue, those are the men who work for the big corporations I work for. And I have worked for them all my life. I look at their faces and I know how much they drink, I know if they cheat on their wives, I know why they’re in Vietnam, I know what their relationship is to Asian people. I understand it and then I can photograph it.

The day after he made the Mission Council portrait, Avedon prepared his return. He and Hales packed their luggage and equipment, and secured the more than 1,000 sheets of film exposed during the trip’s 49 sessions. Concerned about the possibility of damage or loss, Avedon decided that he and Hales would hand-carry the exposed film aboard the plane to New York. Before leaving for the airport, someone gave Avedon a small bird, purchased from a Buddhist temple:

It was suggested that he should let the bird fly free for merit, good fortune, a safe return. The car was stopped by a city park on the way out of Saigon and Dick alone walked to the trees. Quietly the bird was released to fly free as we looked on with hope.

May 1971-September 1973:
The End of Hard Times
Back from Vietnam, Avedon was dismayed to find that several negatives from the trip were damaged — partially or wholly “fogged” with inadvertent light exposure. The trip’s work was plagued by a lack of technical control, no doubt a significant frustration for Avedon, who was accustomed to the rigid controls afforded by studio systemization.

After making proofs and selecting the best exposures from the sittings, Avedon was largely disappointed with the results. The majority of his photographs would not be printed or published for nearly 30 years, and only the lineup of the Mission Council was perceived as an accomplished portrait. “I photographed every day for seven weeks in Vietnam, and this is the only photograph I’m willing to show,” he said of that portrait. Avedon again was moved to reconsider the scope of Hard Times, the conception of which had long been in flux and changed considerably after his trip.

In May 1971, Gloria Emerson recounted Avedon’s time in Vietnam in an article for The New York Times. She described his new style — the 8 x 10 format and the isolating white backdrop — and his intention to “take the romance and the lying out of pictures.” His photographs, she wrote, featured “some of the Americans r