Show Spotlights Avedon's Melancholy Fashion Genius

For 60 years Richard Avedon was the quintessential fashion photographer, and his black-and-white images established an ideal of beauty for a generation. Now, 5 years after his death, the International Center of Photography in New York is mounting a retrospective of Avedon’s fashion work. For Times critic Cathy Horyn, his career was a “plea for beauty,” even if beauty “had an element of tragedy.”

Avedon learned to take pictures in the merchant marine during World War II; his collaborations with editor Diana Vreeland at Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue produced legendary photos, but a melancholy pervades much of his work—perhaps linked to the death of his sister, a beautiful woman committed to a mental institution. For Avedon, Horyn writes, “beauty could be intoxicating but, equally, impoverishing to the soul.” (More International Center of Photography stories.)