I came in at a time when there weren’t any young photographers working in a free way. Everyone was tired, the war was over, Dior let the skirts down, and suddenly everything was fun. It was historically a marvelous moment for a fashion photographer to begin.
—Richard Avedon
During a career that spanned nearly sixty years, Richard Avedon re-defined fashion and portrait photography in an extraordinary body of work about beauty, power, age, and identity. Ranging across a full breadth of subject matter in reportage, portraiture, fashion, and advertising work, he dissolved the perceived barriers between photography’s many genres.
Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of Avedon’s early fashion photography, depicting women in elegant couture amidst the cafés, nightclubs, and street life of postwar Paris. Appearing in Harper's Bazaar at the height of its influence, his photographs were instrumental in changing the popular understanding of fashion. Indeed, their influence still resonates in the fashion magazines of today.
The photographs in this exhibition were selected by Avedon in 1978 for the portfolio Avedon/Paris, on the eve of a retrospective exhibition of his fashion work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. They depict celebrated beauties in high fashion, including Marlene Dietrich in Dior, Dorian Leigh in Piguet, and Suzy Parker in Lanvin-Castillo. These photographs exemplify Avedon’s innovative style during his earliest creative peak: his models are full of expression, smiling, laughing, and posed in action in the City of Light.
