Working the Room. Geoff Dyer
of the American anorak. Avedon, in this image, keeps his distance. More usually his sitters (who are rarely permitted the luxury of a seat) are subjected to a visual interrogation that quite literally flies in the face of Auden’s ideas of good photographic manners:
It is very rude to take close-ups and, except
when enraged, we don’t:
lovers, approaching to kiss,
instinctively shut their eyes before their faces
can be reduced to
anatomical data.
Avedon’s critics allege that this is what he did consistently and deliberately: reduced faces to anatomical data. At the very least, as Truman Capote happily observed, Avedon was interested in ‘the mere condition of a face’. If this had the quality of disinterested inquiry others claimed that his impulses were crueller, more manipulative – an opinion that Avedon occasionally confirmed. In 1957 he caught the Duke and Duchess of Windsor recoiling from the world as if it were a perfectly bloody little place. According to Diane Arbus this result was achieved by Avedon explaining that on the way to the shoot his taxi ran over a dog. As the Windsors flinched with sympathetic horror he clicked the shutter.
It has also been suggested that the photographs of crumpled, ageing faces were in some way Avedon’s revenge on the fashion and glamour business in which he made his name, an explicit rebuke to the claim that his work was all surface and no depth. This opposition cannot long be sustained. As Avedon rightly insisted, ‘The surface is all you’ve got. You can only get beyond the surface by working with the surface.’ And the movement between the two activities, between fashion and portraiture was, in any case, constant and mutually informing.
A little detour, via French street photography, will show how.
Jacques Henri Lartigue’s photographs have exactly the unposed, felicitous spontaneity that made Robert Doisneau’s later image of a Parisian couple kissing immediately appealing. As is now well known, ‘The Kiss’ was deliberately choreographed by the photographer. In this transition, from the happy accidents of Lartigue to the premeditated charm of Doisneau, we can see one of the two contradictory but complementary impulses that have also animated the history of fashion photography. The unposed becomes the template for a pose; the miracle of the unguarded moment is always being turned into a style and a commodity.
Evidence of the other, contrary, movement is also found throughout the history of fashion photography. An established way of photographing models or clothes becomes too artificial, too static, too posed. Then someone comes along and, through a combination of ambition, daring and vision, injects an element of spontaneity, naturalness. Take any of the famous names in the history of fashion photography and the chances are you will discover that they once offered a liberating alternative to the staid, that they wanted ‘to get away from the piss elegance of it all’ (not Bailey, Beaton!) or felt like ‘a street savage surrounded by sophisticates’ (Irving Penn!). The peculiar twist of fashion photography is that this ‘naturalness’ is achieved by – or immediately creates the conditions for – further contrivance. It cannot be otherwise, for the effect the images are ultimately intended to create (a willingness, desire or aspiration to purchase the stuff the models are wearing) precedes and has priority over what is randomly discovered.
This is why any discussion of fashion photography comes, inevitably, back to Avedon, who tirelessly and inventively raised the bar of contrived naturalness. Far from negating this practice his portraits are the most extreme expression of contriving a way of stripping away contrivances. One sees this nakedly in Laura Wilson’s photographs of Avedon at work on the portraits of drifters and workers collected in In the American West: lights, assistants and blank white paper cut off his subjects from their natural habitat more completely than the bars of a zoo. Thus confined they are granted an anonymous kind of celebrity, ostensibly because Avedon was a photographer with an instantly recognisable style; more subtly, because the cumulative effect of ruthless stripping away is not simply to lay bare. Revelation is also a means of generation.
What, then, is being generated?
In the work of David Octavius Hill and his contemporaries, Walter Benjamin was struck by the way that ‘light struggles out of darkness’. Benjamin went on to describe how, from about 1850 to 1880, the client was confronted with a ‘a technician of the latest school’ whereas the photographer was confronted by a ‘member of a rising class equipped with an aura that had seeped into the very folds of the man’s frock coat or floppy cravat’. Benjamin was adamant that the aura was not simply the product of primitive technology. Rather, in that early period, subject and technique were ‘exactly congruent’. This lasted only a short while, for ‘soon advances in optics made instruments available that put darkness entirely to flight and recorded appearances as faithfully as any mirror’. As a result the aura was ‘banished from the picture with the rout of darkness through faster and faster lenses’.
With Avedon – ‘that wonderful, terrible mirror’, as Cocteau called him – the wheel came full circle. Absolute whiteness took the place of the darkness against which the light had struggled to emerge. And in this renewed and reversed congruence of subject and technique, a new aura and order emerged, one based on the reciprocity of fame. A famous photographer takes pictures of famous people (people whose aura has seeped into their cravats – or shirts, or dresses – and whose aura, in the kind of inversion beloved by the Frankfurt school, is often the product of the cravats – or shirts, or dresses – which they have been paid to model and which he has been paid to photograph). In the 1960s and ’70s, according to Diane Arbus’ biographer, Patricia Bosworth, ‘everybody who entered Avedon’s studio was some kind of star’. Thereafter, even if you weren’t famous when you went in, you sort of were when you came out. Either way, a portrait of oneself by Avedon was a highly personalised status symbol. OK, he might make your face look, as Les Dawson said of his mother-in-law, ‘like a bag of spanners’, but the photograph had the quality of – in fact was a record of – election. To be photographed by Avedon thus afforded a double means of recognition. Consequently people turned up for their session as if for a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, almost, as the saying goes, for a rendezvous with destiny.
Again this connects Avedon with nineteenth-century photographers such as Julia Margaret Cameron (with whom he felt a special affinity). Back then, according to Benjamin, everything about the elaborate procedure of having one’s picture taken ‘caused the subject to focus his life in the moment rather than hurrying on past it; during the considerable period of the exposure the subject as it were grew into the picture’. In these pictures, ‘the very creases in people’s clothes have an air of permanence’. Avedon, of course, worked with split-second exposure times but the results were in some ways even more striking: the creases in people’s faces have an air of geological permanence. There is the sense, often, of a massive extent of time being compressed into the moment the picture was taken. ‘Lately,’ he said in 1970, ‘I’ve become interested in the passage of time within a photograph.’ So, in one of his most famous portraits, Isak Dinesen looks like she was once the most beautiful woman in the world – about two thousand years ago.
It’s a picture which makes one think of the Sybil who asked for immortality while forgetting to ask for eternal youth. For his part Avedon wondered if people came to him in the same way they might go to a fortune-teller. (He was not alone in this: André Breton, Bill Brandt and Diane Arbus also believed the photographer should attempt to conjure a likeness which, in Brandt’s words, ‘physically and morally predicts the subject’s entire future’.) If that’s the case then Avedon’s prophecies are self-fulfilling and self-revealing. Character is fate. Or maybe that should read character is face. George Orwell famously claimed that by a certain age everyone gets the face they deserve; Martin Amis updated this: nowadays everyone gets the face they can afford. In America this might seem like a quaintly British distinction: you deserve what you can afford; as far as Avedon was concerned everyone’s face got photographed the same way regardless (we’ll return to that word shortly). Fame, face and fate were – give or take a consonant – synonyms. It was a credo that kept faith, simultaneously, with the hierarchy of glamour and the levelling gaze of biological destiny. Looking