Portrait of an unseen land
David Sexton
IN THE AMERICAN WEST by Richard Avedon Thames & Hudson, f40 Richard Avedon began his photo- graphic career taking ID shots when he was in the Merchant Marine during the second world war. By 1947 he was covering the Paris fashion collections, and he estab- lished his name with a sustained output of brilliantly mobile, elegant pictures of mod- els and society belles. His work celebrated fashion's immediacy, with bodies leaping, hair flying, liquid splashing. He still takes Part in the glamour business, and did the famous jeans poster, 'There's nothing be- tween me and my Calvins.' There has, however, been another, apparently very different, side to his work: Portraits which insist upon the human frailties his fashion pictures ignore. Stra- vinsky, Pound and other celebrities were taken by him, close up, in pitilessly precise focus against blank backgrounds, their faces ravaged by time and anxiety. (Only One subject seems to have overcome this technique, Alfred Hitchcock; in Avedon's Portrait, he hold his hands in mock prayer and looks upwards, showing only the whites of his eyes — clear victor of the encounter.) Avedon's clinical style found its most radical expression when between 1969 and 1973 he took a series of pictures, under the same conditions, of his elderly father dying of cancer. The man can be seen shrinking, petrified with fear. These Photographs belong to those few which once seen can never be forgotten. Like Pornography, their accuracy without feel- ing suggests something about photography itself — about what it means that imagina- tion has no part in the process by which a Photograph is actually made. In this extraordinary new collection he has turned the lens previously reserved for the smart and significant onto the poor and unconsidered of the American West. In 1979 the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth commissioned the project, and over five summers Avedon drove around `hometowns and country fairs, rodeos and threshing bees, mining camps and drilling sites' in 17 states, looking for the faces he wanted. The people he found were posed in front of a plain sheet of white paper and photographed in the shade so that an effect of absolutely regular lighting was obtained and the eye not directed by shadow or highlight to one part of the body more than another. An old-fashioned Deardorf view camera was used with a sheet of 10 x 8 film for each exposure, and the pictures have now been exquisitely printed (in Japan) on a grand scale.
In his choice of subject Avedon has revealed himself here as a conscious suc- cessor to his friend Diane Arbus, as he seeks out the freakish and crippled. There are hoboes and drifters, patients from mental hospitals, an atomic fall-out victim, a transvestite prisoner, a naked, bald beekeeper covered with bees. There are the three sisters who for 22 years have been co-presidents of the Loretta Lynn Fan Club. There are polyestered Mormons, black-suited Hutterite boys , and Hispanic prisoners in Texan jails with Christ's Sor- rowful Head tattooed on their chests. There are miners engrained with coal-dust, oil-field labourers slick with grease, a slaughterhouse worker splattered with blood. In his company even the young seem marked down. 'B. J. Van Fleet, nine-year-old' from Montana, stares out with the face of a brutal middle-aged man as he cradles a rifle. Avedon's idea of these people is suggested by the only non-human subject matter: a gutted snake, the drip- ping heads of flayed steers and slaughtered sheep. Yet the book is not just a freak-show. The pictures are overwhelmingly powerful, made with real cunning. By reducing his technical decisions to 'the correct place- ment of the camera, its precise distance from the subject, the distribution of the space around the figure, and the height of the lens' Avedon succeeds in making these choices enormously significant. An ox-like migrant worker looms up, filling the frame, while an aged, desiccated drylands farmer is surrounded by emptiness.
Throughout, the blankness of the back- ground excites the imagination. As a por- trait of a region which is never itself shown, the book is marvellously suggestive. Since these people have been stripped of the ordinary contexts which constitute their lives, the spectator is forced to seek in their faces for their stories. The harsh climate is conveyed by skin damage, the working conditions by engrained dirt. The sharp focus exposes the subject's body as evi- dence of his life, turning it into a history of damage. As a result of the pictures having no other temporality (the lighting not suggesting the hour or season), the people themselves come to seem the very source of change and decay.
It would surely be terrifying for anyone at all to be photographed like this. And these people were very much selected for it, fitted into preconceived slots. 'The structure of the project was clear to me almost from the start and each new portrait had to find its place in that structure,' Avedon says. The people were seen not in themselves but as part of a grand machine. Avedon is deprecatory about what he has done. 'This is a fictional West,' he re- marks. 'I don't think the West of these portraits is any more conclusive than the West of John Wayne.' But the people in the pictures are real, if the West they have been placed in is not. They have not been imagined, but waylaid and pilloried.
In the American West is certainly some sort of triumph, and anyone interested in photography should see it. Little writing on the region could rival it for interest. But it is Avedon himself the album tells us most about. Susan Sontag once described a fashion photographer as 'a fabricator of the cosmetic lie that masks the intractable inequalities of birth and class and physical appearance'. Avedon, perhaps thinking to tear off the mask, has only inverted the lie; he has used others to revenge himself on his own career.
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