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A generation has passed since Richard Avedon took his first photographs in the summer of 1979 for the exhibition and book, In the American West. At the time, his portraits contradicted the most recognized work by the most honored photographers of the West. Avedon's West was a shock. Where were the lush, pristine landscapes of Carlton Watkins or Ansel Adams? Where were the cowboys of Life magazine's Toni Frisell and Leonard McCombe? And certainly Avedon's Native Americans looked nothing like the Indians Edward Curtis photographed in war-bonnets and porcupine quills. In 1985, when the work was complete, not one museum in New York City would agree to an exhibition. "Avedon's West," declared John Szarkowski, then the Museum of Modern Art's preeminent curator of photography, "is not the West as I know it."
Although critical acclaim mattered to Avedon, he understood where he was headed and who his subjects should be far better than the critics ever could. He had purposely titled his book In the American West, not The American West. These portraits were an extension of his previous work: portraits of his father, of Jean Renoir, Marilyn Monroe, and Francis Bacon, photographs of patients from the East Louisiana State Hospital and, going back to the 1940's, portraits of street performers in Italy. When you look at his work as a whole, you can see that the portraits overlap and relate to one another. These portraits made in the West became part of a continuous and developing whole. They reflect Avedon's single-minded pursuit of his own vision, his exploration of the ambiguity and absurdity of the human situation. They were never meant to be a representative selection of Westerners. He said, "These are people without a voice. I wanted to learn what we had in common. Certain things are shared by everyone. I'm interested in connections between people of remote experience, in unexpected similarities. Paradox, irony, contradiction - those interest me in a photograph."
The challenge for Avedon was to find a connection to people with whom he was unfamiliar, people who mined coal, worked in slaughter houses, or waitressed at roadside cafes. "In the West," Avedon said, "I worked with very, very strong feelings. I photographed what I feared: aging, death, and the despair of living," On the road, Dick often had severe headaches. He would go back to the motel, pull the shades down, take some medicine, and wait until the headaches went away. In retrospect he said, "Those were important headaches. The work was not thought out. I was expressing my feelings in the only way I could, by taking pictures. It came from within, from a desire to make the portraits crucial. When I try to put it into words, it's less than the pictures will ever be."
In Butte, Montana, Dick photographed an unemployed copper miner, Roy Gustavson and his wife Judy. I remember he looked in wonder at them. It was 1983, and eighteen hundred miners had just been laid off. Seven hundred houses were up for sale. The huge Berkley open-pit mine shut down. The value of copper had dropped. The selling price of 75 cents per pound didn't cover the cost - a dollar a pound - to get the ore out of the ground. "Butte couldn't be worse if a cyclone hit it," one miner told us. What happens to people when they lose their work? Where do they go when there's nowhere to turn? These were the questions the men and women in the portraits faced. Luck running out formed the narrative behind many of the photographs.
Avedon chose certain people because they seemed to be asking, on a deep level, some of the questions he was asking. He saw in them an expression of what he himself felt. I'm sure a great many people he photographed had their own expectations for the photographs and had no idea what he was doing or why he chose them. They could not anticipate what his pictures of them would look like. By conventional terms, many of the portraits were unflattering. Critics attacked him for exploiting people who were unaware of his intentions. In his forward to In the American West, he said, "A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone willing to become implicated in a fiction he cannot possibly know about. My concerns are not his. We have separate ambitions for the image. His need to plead his case probably goes as deep as my need to plead mine, but the control is with me."
I assisted Richard Avedon for six years and watched a man who had spent almost forty years looking and judging, selecting and inventing, transforming his subjects into metaphors of his own meaning. He looked for inspiration everywhere. Work had become the source of his energy and he worked constantly often to exhaustion. Everything else in his life was secondary. I saw what was given up, what was gained and I learned just how imaginative, unrelenting and brave an artist must be.
In the end Richard Avedon photographed 752 people, using 17,000 sheets of film. We worked in 17 states and 189 towns. From this collection he chose 123 photographs for the exhibition at the Amon Carter Museum. Mitch Wilder died on April 1, 1979 of leukemia after having been diagnosed only six weeks earlier. He never saw a photograph from the western project. The museum went forward with the project. In the end, the portraits were printed life-size and slightly larger to provoke a confrontation between the viewer and the subject. In life, you often can't really look at someone the way you would like to, you can't stare. It would be embarrassing. In movies and on television people move, but with these large portraits, you could stand in front of them and look for as long as you wanted. And the people looked back. There was an exchange. In that scale the photographs took on a life of their own. Dick said, "I know that sounds like fake modesty, or some Zen thing, but really I feel that these people are so powerful. When you look, really look, they say such varied things with their faces and their bodies. It's almost as if there was no photographer. I'm out of it. I feel the work now belongs to the people themselves. It's between them and you."
Although critical acclaim mattered to Avedon, he understood where he was headed and who his subjects should be far better than the critics ever could. He had purposely titled his book In the American West, not The American West. These portraits were an extension of his previous work: portraits of his father, of Jean Renoir, Marilyn Monroe, and Francis Bacon, photographs of patients from the East Louisiana State Hospital and, going back to the 1940's, portraits of street performers in Italy. When you look at his work as a whole, you can see that the portraits overlap and relate to one another. These portraits made in the West became part of a continuous and developing whole. They reflect Avedon's single-minded pursuit of his own vision, his exploration of the ambiguity and absurdity of the human situation. They were never meant to be a representative selection of Westerners. He said, "These are people without a voice. I wanted to learn what we had in common. Certain things are shared by everyone. I'm interested in connections between people of remote experience, in unexpected similarities. Paradox, irony, contradiction - those interest me in a photograph."
The challenge for Avedon was to find a connection to people with whom he was unfamiliar, people who mined coal, worked in slaughter houses, or waitressed at roadside cafes. "In the West," Avedon said, "I worked with very, very strong feelings. I photographed what I feared: aging, death, and the despair of living," On the road, Dick often had severe headaches. He would go back to the motel, pull the shades down, take some medicine, and wait until the headaches went away. In retrospect he said, "Those were important headaches. The work was not thought out. I was expressing my feelings in the only way I could, by taking pictures. It came from within, from a desire to make the portraits crucial. When I try to put it into words, it's less than the pictures will ever be."
In Butte, Montana, Dick photographed an unemployed copper miner, Roy Gustavson and his wife Judy. I remember he looked in wonder at them. It was 1983, and eighteen hundred miners had just been laid off. Seven hundred houses were up for sale. The huge Berkley open-pit mine shut down. The value of copper had dropped. The selling price of 75 cents per pound didn't cover the cost - a dollar a pound - to get the ore out of the ground. "Butte couldn't be worse if a cyclone hit it," one miner told us. What happens to people when they lose their work? Where do they go when there's nowhere to turn? These were the questions the men and women in the portraits faced. Luck running out formed the narrative behind many of the photographs.
Avedon chose certain people because they seemed to be asking, on a deep level, some of the questions he was asking. He saw in them an expression of what he himself felt. I'm sure a great many people he photographed had their own expectations for the photographs and had no idea what he was doing or why he chose them. They could not anticipate what his pictures of them would look like. By conventional terms, many of the portraits were unflattering. Critics attacked him for exploiting people who were unaware of his intentions. In his forward to In the American West, he said, "A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture. The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered in someone willing to become implicated in a fiction he cannot possibly know about. My concerns are not his. We have separate ambitions for the image. His need to plead his case probably goes as deep as my need to plead mine, but the control is with me."
I assisted Richard Avedon for six years and watched a man who had spent almost forty years looking and judging, selecting and inventing, transforming his subjects into metaphors of his own meaning. He looked for inspiration everywhere. Work had become the source of his energy and he worked constantly often to exhaustion. Everything else in his life was secondary. I saw what was given up, what was gained and I learned just how imaginative, unrelenting and brave an artist must be.
In the end Richard Avedon photographed 752 people, using 17,000 sheets of film. We worked in 17 states and 189 towns. From this collection he chose 123 photographs for the exhibition at the Amon Carter Museum. Mitch Wilder died on April 1, 1979 of leukemia after having been diagnosed only six weeks earlier. He never saw a photograph from the western project. The museum went forward with the project. In the end, the portraits were printed life-size and slightly larger to provoke a confrontation between the viewer and the subject. In life, you often can't really look at someone the way you would like to, you can't stare. It would be embarrassing. In movies and on television people move, but with these large portraits, you could stand in front of them and look for as long as you wanted. And the people looked back. There was an exchange. In that scale the photographs took on a life of their own. Dick said, "I know that sounds like fake modesty, or some Zen thing, but really I feel that these people are so powerful. When you look, really look, they say such varied things with their faces and their bodies. It's almost as if there was no photographer. I'm out of it. I feel the work now belongs to the people themselves. It's between them and you."
Avedon evaluates the prints in his studio. To make a superior print, one that contained all the nuances Dick required, was a real challenge. Sometimes three to five days would be spent on a single negative to make a perfect print.
Ruedi Hoffman, Avedon抯 studio manager, and David Liittschwager worked a year and a half to print 123 negatives. The majority of the negatives were printed on 56x45 inch sheets of paper. Ten were printed to 78x64 inches sheets. The difficult and time-consuming process making these prints began in the basement of Avedon抯 studio in New York.
Avedon photographs Richard Wheatcroft on his ranch. The ranch is so remote that mail is delivered only three times a week and cellular coverage uncertain. The ranch gate is nine miles from a paved road.
Jordan, Montana, 6/27/83Miles City, Montana, hosts the most 揥estern� of events each May, a bucking horse sale. Rank horses, brought in from ranches, buck and lunge out of chutes as an auctioneer briskly sells the stock to rodeo contractors from all over the West. One night after the sale, Avedon and Wilson went to a bar in Miles City and met by chance, Richard Wheatcroft. He was twenty-four and ran the cattle his grandfather had put together starting in 1914 with a homestead allotment of 320 free acres. His grandfather continued to buy land during the Depression and in times of drought from hard-up neighbors.
In 1978 Richard found his father crushed to death under a tractor, and the responsibility of running the 15,000-acre ranch near Jordan fell to him. In Wilson抯 picture Richard Wheatcroft is in the center. Brad, his brother, who worked as a Lawyer in Miles City, is on the right. The girl on the left, Patty, became Richard抯 wife.
In 1978 Richard found his father crushed to death under a tractor, and the responsibility of running the 15,000-acre ranch near Jordan fell to him. In Wilson抯 picture Richard Wheatcroft is in the center. Brad, his brother, who worked as a Lawyer in Miles City, is on the right. The girl on the left, Patty, became Richard抯 wife.
Initially the men were taken aback; they had just arrived for the morning shift, lunch pails in hand. Then they moved closer looking at details, making comments.
After several trips to Colorado抯 North Fork Valley, Dick wanted to thank the miners. He wanted them to know how much their cooperation had meant, so he created an exhibition for them, to show his appreciation. Avedon and Wilson tacked up large prints on the exterior wall of the bathhouse next to the hill where they went underground. That was the first time any of the portraits were exhibited. It seemed fitting that they were seen first not by detached museum audiences, but the miners themselves.
In a coal mining valley on the western slope of Colorado, beautiful area of fruit orchards and streams, Avedon photographed at four tunnel mines. Most of the miners came from the small towns of Paonia and Somerset. Their families had lived in the valley for several generations. Brian Justice, a foreman at the Somerset Mine, said, 揗iners pit themselves against the earth, like sailors going out to sea. They aren抰 loyal to the company, they抮e loyal to the coal.� The Tribble brothers were strong young miners in their twenties. They liked the challenge of mining, the dangers and the money. Only the week before, Dave Tibble told them, he had been buried alive for nineteen hours. He had been working a mile underground when the cave-in occurred. He was at the end of the tunnel; big machines cut the 揻ace� where coal is cut. He clung to the cutting machine, finding pockets of air in and around it and waited until rescuers dug him out.
In the middle of the portrait session, Dick, his adrenaline pumping rushed up to look closely at the faces of the three sisters. You could see his intensity as he checked the light in their eyes. Often the speed and concentration with which he worked were transmitted to his subjects. During a portrait session, tension built and did not let up till the last frame when Dick decided he had what he wanted.
The Johnson sisters were at a country fair in Calhan, Colorado, making an appearance to photograph Loretta Lynn when Dick first saw and photographed them. The sisters chose to wear fancy dresses, gowns they had recently worn at the biggest country music shindig of the year in Nashville. Dick decided the portrait he did of them in the dresses was unsuccessful; the dresses were too elaborate, too much like costumes. They overwhelmed the essential quality of the women. So the next year, Avedon and Wilson returned to see them in their own surroundings.
Wild Horse, Colorado 6/16/83Ludilla, Loretta, and Kay Johnson were plainswomen. The sisters lived on a 9,000-acre wheat farm in Wild Horse. Their great passion is country music. The sisters have been president, vice-president and secretary/treasurer of the Loretta Lynn fan club.
On the road near Casa Grande, Arizona, on their way to a copper mine, they stopped to photograph a steer that had been hit by a truck.
While visiting South Texas, Avedon and Wilson became fascinated with a tattoo parlor in San Antonio. A policeman walked in and, overhearing their conversation, told them that if they wanted to see great tattoos they should go to the Bexar County Jail. The warden arranged for Avedon抯 two assistants to set up a seamless paper on the exercise roof of the jail.
Laura arranged for Avedon to go to a farm in Solano County, California, where an entomologist from the University of California at Davis brought 120,000 bees to the site, and Dick began to photograph early in the morning on the shady side of a barn. The entomologist took a dropper from a tiny bottle filled with pheromone fluid, containing the bee抯 scent, and dabbed it onto Fisher抯 chest. This scent both attracted the bees and prevented them from stinging the man抯 flesh. In the first session, a thousand worker bees swarmed Fisher抯 bare chest, arms, and head.
Avedon got the idea of photographing a man covered with bees from Laura Wilson抯 son, Andrew, who had seen a man in his class with a beard of bees. Soon after, Dick woke one morning from a half-conscious state and drew a picture of a man swarmed by bees. In the days that followed, about 40 pictures came in the mail, and then a Polaroid arrived of a man with an extraordinary face. A note was attached: "I probably don抰 look right for what you want, but I would like to do it." The note was signed, "Ronald Fisher.
Sweetwater, Texas, 6/15/79. It was 107 degrees in Sweetwater -- hotter still by 10 to 20 degrees inside the aging gypsum plant built half a century earlier. Jimmy Lopez had been at work since 7 a.m., lifting hundred-pound bags of gypsum plaster off packing machines and onto a hand truck. During the portrait session, Dick said very little, simply a word or two to encourage Lopez. It wasn抰 until after the end of the session, after Dick had thanked him, that he admitted almost fainting from the glare, the hot wind, and the strangeness of the situation.
At the end of a long hard day, people often took us to their house or showed us places or people they thought might be of particular interest. One evening we received an important lesson in the Texas two-step in an oil field worker抯 trailer.
Oil rig workers pose for the camera. To make a good portrait requires concentration. Dick抯 working method -- with the large camera, the white paper and two assistants -- commands respect.
The beginning of this project coincided with an oil boom in the West. In June 1980 we were heading back to Yukon, Oklahoma, having just photographed oil field workers on the rig that was visible through the car抯 windshield, when we came across a man walking along Interstate 40 with his bedroll on his shoulders. We slowed down to get a closer look and ask him a few questions. He said his name was Bill Curry. Dick asked to take his picture, and he got in the car.
