Ron Howard’s 'Avedon' Lands on Netflix, Tracing 60-Year Career Through 16,000 Sittings
Updated
Updated · The Guardian · Nov 10
Ron Howard’s 'Avedon' Lands on Netflix, Tracing 60-Year Career Through 16,000 Sittings
3 articles · Updated · The Guardian · Nov 10
Summary
Netflix releases Ron Howard’s documentary "Avedon" on Nov. 11, using unprecedented access to the photographer’s archive to chart a six-decade career from Harper’s Bazaar to the New Yorker.
16,000 sittings and hundreds of thousands of images underpin the film, alongside newly mined studio audio tapes that show Avedon wrestling with truth, identity, beauty and the tension between commerce and art.
More than 100,000 Merchant Marine ID photos and autopsy records helped shape his stark white-backdrop style, which later defined portraits of figures from Marilyn Monroe to civil rights activists and working-class Americans.
The film also stresses Avedon’s contradictions: a commercially successful image-maker who funded riskier political work, quietly aided SNCC, and remained driven by anxiety and self-doubt until his 2004 death at 81.
With his aging portraits currently exhibiting in Toronto, what secrets do Avedon’s archives reveal about the deep anxieties driving his legendary career?
Why did Richard Avedon rely on exhaustion and stark white backdrops to capture the hidden, vulnerable truths of 20th-century icons?
Was Avedon’s method of pushing subjects like Marilyn Monroe to their emotional breaking points a stroke of genius or psychological exploitation?