“I used a white background,” he later wrote, “from the beginning.”Īvedon also greatly admired the portrait photographs of the mid-nineteenth century, especially those by Nadar and by Julia Margaret Cameron.

The stark, frontal identification images would become his signature style as a professional photographer. As a photographer’s mate, second class, he was stationed at the base in Sheepshead Bay, New York, and through 1945 he photographed thousands of fellow mariners who shipped overseas. With the advent of World War II, he joined the Merchant Marine. After graduating in 1942 he briefly attended the Art Students League in New York City, where he studied sculpture with Ossip Zadkine. (In 1946 they collaborated on an unfinished book, Harlem Doorways.) During Avedon’s junior year (1941) he won first prize in the school’s annual poetry contest. “They were all,” he once said, “all memories of my sister.”Īvedon attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, where he and the future writer James Baldwin were the coeditors of the school’s literary magazine. Her beauty-brunette hair, oval face, fine nose, and long throat-became his feminine ideal for his later models, from Dorian Leigh to Audrey Hepburn. He began taking his own photographs at age twelve when he joined the local YMCA camera club in 1935 and used his sister as his model.

Avedon later wrote about his childhood, “we used to think of ourselves as a fashionable family.” In fact, he clipped fashion photographs that he admired and decorated his bedroom walls with them. Avedon and his younger sister avidly read fashion magazines as children.

Avedon’s father successfully reopened the store in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, commuting to it from the Bronx by train. His father was the owner of Avedon’s Fifth Avenue, a women’s clothing specialty shop in the Bronx that went bankrupt during the Great Depression. His mother’s family owned a dress manufacturing business. 1 October 2004 in San Antonio, Texas), prolific and innovative fashion and portrait photographer whose images in Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, Vanity Fair, and the New Yorker defined style and sophistication for sixty years.Īvedon’s parents, Anna (Polonsky) Avedon, a homemaker, and Jacob Israel Avedon, a clothing store owner, were from second-generation Russian-Jewish immigrant families who had settled in New York City’s Lower East Side and then the Bronx.

Richard avedon portrait photography