Avedon R. Avedon: Photographs 1947-1977

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1978. — 220 p.Avedon never was much influenced by painting. His photographs are always photographs, and they do not play sentimentally with the stillness of the photographic image — the unearned or mechanical stillness. In Avedon's photographs, that stillness is ravaged by motion, the hint of motion, or by feeling: that is to say, emotion. He will often refuse to have, if he can manage it, a single picture: on the motionlessness of a single photograph he will superimpose the movement of a sequence — movements of comparisons, movements of the mind. Didactic and godless, kinetic and beyond moralizing (usually), he gives in a single photograph a fact at odds with romance which is always so self-consciously present or so absent it is powerfully part of the effect on the mind. The shapes, angles, name of the sitter, settings or white backgrounds are all elements of a seduction by excitement, truth, intelligence — and motion.