He is one of fashion’s most iconic photographers, and the white backgrounds of his portraits are an unmistakable hallmark of his style.
Richard Avedon portrayed people with a profound intensity, isolating them “from their environment. They become in a sense…symbolic of themselves”, as he wrote. But there are other productions in his work, other subjects, other modes, perhaps less well known, such as the photographs he took in Italy, to be seen in the exhibition that the Gagosian Gallery, in Rome, is dedicating to him. Richard Avedon: Italian Days, that’s the title, makes for an interesting comparison between the photographs Avedon took in Italy and some of his iconic portraits.
In particular, the Italy series (1946-48), presented here in its entirety for the first time, as well as photographs taken in Rome, Venice and Sicily. Richard Avedon arrived in Rome in 1946, just after the end of World War II, (a peculiar time, with the country suspended between the ruins of war and the hope of reconstruction) and returned several times over the following decade. Not surprisingly, a portrait of him at the Milan railway station by his wife is the opening image of the exhibition.
The photographs he took during these years were of fundamental importance for his approach to the portrait. At a time when the charm of the landscape and the monuments contrasted with the devastation left by the war, Avedon was also struck by the legacy of thousands of years of history and the discovery in the streets of a multitude of human expressions, of poverty and the desire for rebirth, leading him to infuse each image with a spectrum of emotions that would remain characteristic of his style. At that time, as later, the human being was at the centre of his pictures.
The exhibition follows the ideal thread which links these “Italian” photographs to his most famous works: images in dialogue, reflecting links in technique, subject and composition.
Among the correspondences in Italian Days is that between the image of a group of little girls running in Piazza Navona (this is 1946) and the 1971 portrait of the actress Bette Midler, which looks just as dynamic and spontaneous.
Or the formal and compositional references of the subjects, one being the lady photographed in Piazza San Pietro, Rome, in 1946 (note how the high-key background seems almost evanescent) and the other Jacqueline Kennedy in New York in 1958.
Another suggestion for research, again as part of the exhibition, draws a line from the dancing figure in Italy #8, Palermo, Sicily, 1947, to the later images of the American model Dorian Leigh posing with a cyclist on the Champs-Elysées.
The design of this exhibition, which emphasises the links and cross-references between the images, has been conceived by Cécile Degos, who was also responsible for the design of the exhibition Iconic Avedon: A Centennial Celebration of Richard Avedon at Gagosian Paris in 2024
Avedon’s words, reported by Susan Sontag (On photography, 1977), are a valid guide to the exhibition in Rome: “The photographs have a reality for me that the people don’t. It is through the photographs that I know them”. Unlike other writers, such as Nadar (again according to Sontag), who used to say of his portraits of Baudelaire, Dorè, Hugo, Sand, Delacroix and other famous friends “the portrait I do best is of the person I know best”, Avedon said his best portraits are of people he just met, but that “it is through the photographs that I know them.”
In any case, for Avedon, the moment of the portrait, whether in the studio or on the street, as in the case of the photos taken in Italy, is the result of concentration to the limit, as the author himself explained: “The concentration has to come from me and involve them (the subjects of the portraits, ed). Sometimes the force of it grows so strong that sounds in the studio go unheard. Time stops”.
Gagosian has represented the work of Richard Avedon worldwide since 2011. The work by the photographer will be the subject of an exhibition at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris, opening on April 30, 2025.
Paola Sammartano
Richard Avedon : Italian Days
March 12 – May 17, 2025
Gagosian
Via Francesco Crispi 16
00187 Rome
Italy
