For Richard Avedon, as with most significant artists, work and life were inseparable. When the photographer died in 2004, at 81, he was on the road, mid-project — “with his boots on,” in the words of Lauren Hutton, one of the many beautiful people he helped to immortalize over a 60-year career. Hutton and the two dozen or so other interviewees in Ron Howard’s admiring documentary make it clear how much affection the New York native inspired while reinventing fashion photography and putting his iconoclastic stamp on fine-art portraiture.

The profile Avedon paints is that of a relentless seeker and high-flying achiever, and a deliciously unapologetic contrarian. How can you not adore an image-maker who says, “Beautiful lighting I always find offensive,” and, regarding little kids as potential photographic subjects: “I find them intensely boring.” Avedon’s interest in the grown-up human face, in what it conceals and reveals, was his lifelong project, one that he pursued within circles of rarefied fame, on the backroads of the American West, and in a poignant late-in-life connection with his father.

As confrontational as his images could be, the camera was Avedon’s way of experiencing the world, a way of seeking truth through invention. Howard, whose previous doc subjects include Jim Henson and Luciano Pavarotti, and whose fiction movies are designed more to engage rather than to confront, seems particularly inspired here by Avedon’s auteur approach to still photography — it was a narrative impulse, not a documentary one, that shaped his vision, a drive to create moments and mise-en-scènes for the camera.

Avedon built his career at magazines in an era when magazines mattered. He was only 21 when he joined Harper’s Bazaar, where he stayed for 20 years, leaving to follow fashion editor Diana Vreeland to Vogue, where he stayed even longer. And when Tina Brown took the helm at The New Yorker and overturned its age-old no-photos policy, she hired Avedon as its first staff photographer.

When Harper’s sent him to Paris in 1947 with an edict to summon some of the battered capital’s prewar glamour, he turned to movies for inspiration and conjured visions of romantic fantasy amid the ruins. It was his first significant assignment, and a turning point for fashion photography. The doc emphasizes how, at a Dior show, the images he captured of the designer’s voluminous skirts mid-twirl expressed an ecstatic moment after years of wartime rationing. “People were weeping,” recalls Avedon, a vivid presence in the doc thanks to a strong selection of archival material.

The kinetic energy of those shots would become a defining element of his approach. Injecting movement and a theatrical edge into fashion photography, he lifted it out of the era of posed mannequins. To get models into the spirit of his concepts, he often leapt and danced alongside them. It’s no wonder that in Funny Face, the romantic musical loosely inspired by his career and first marriage, Fred Astaire played the photographer. Eventually Avedon shifted to a large-format camera, an 8×10, that allowed him to interact with his subjects directly, rather than through a viewfinder. There would be more scripted and carefully choreographed moments in his TV spots for Calvin Klein jeans and Obsession, collaborations with the writer Doon Arbus (daughter of Diane and Allan Arbus) that took chances (and which, for some viewers, are inseparable from memorable spoofs on SNL).

Fashion and advertising were mainstays, but he also became a notable portraitist. Positioning his subjects against a plain white background, he removed flattery from the equation. It was an artist-subject relationship in which he held all the power, and he didn’t pretend otherwise; on that point, Brown offers a trenchant anecdote. Remarkably, even though his refusal to sugarcoat was well established — not least by his notorious photo of the Daughters of the American Revolution — an Avedon portrait carried such cachet that establishment figures including the Reagans, Henry Kissinger and George H.W. Bush all submitted themselves to his crosshairs.

The film suggests that a moral imperative was as essential to Avedon’s work as his unconventional aesthetic vocabulary. He threatened to sever his contract with Harper’s when the magazine didn’t want to publish his photos of China Machado, and he prevailed: In 1959, she became the first model of color to appear in the editorial pages of a major American fashion magazine. Howard looks beyond the catwalks and salons to Avedon’s portraits of wartime Saigon, Civil Rights leaders and patients at Bellevue, many of those images collected in Nothing Personal, the book he did with James Baldwin, a friend from high school. A superb clip from a D.A. Pennebaker short of the book launch encapsulates the painfully awkward disconnect between the artist and the corporate media contingent. Most surprising, though, is how hard Avedon took it when the book was lambasted by critics. A later book, In the American West, would also meet harsh criticism; Avedon was, in the eyes of some, a condescending elitist.

Howard’s film is a celebration of a complicated man. It acknowledges Avedon’s naysayers, as well as his struggles and doubts, but this is very much an official story, made in association with the Richard Avedon Foundation, and steering clear of the disputed 2017 biography by Avedon’s business partner. The commentary, whether from models (Hutton, Isabella Rossellini, Twiggy Lawson, Penelope Tree, Beverly Johnson) or writers (Adam Gopnik, John Lahr, Hilton Als) or Avedon’s son, John, can be gushing, but it’s always perceptive.

The connection he sought with his subjects wasn’t about star worship but the instant when the ego lets down its guard, yet at the same time he was more interested in what he called “the marriage of the imagination and the reality” than straight documentation. Without putting too fine a point on it, Avedon links those twinned yet seemingly contradictory impulses to certain formative experiences. There was the devastation of extreme mental illness for Avedon’s sister and his second wife. There was the pretense of happiness in his childhood home in Depression-era New York (the city is captured in terrifically evocative clips). He recalls, discerning and exasperated, the staged domestic harmony — “the borrowed dogs!” — in family photos.

Avedon doesn’t aim to unsettle, like Avedon himself did, but neither does it tie things up neatly. There’s nothing simple or reductive about the emotional throughlines the documentary traces. It embraces the complexities of a man who turned artifice into a kind of superpower, whether he was dreaming up scenarios for fashion spreads or confronting an America as far removed from haute couture Manhattan as you could get.

A stil from ‘Hokum’
| Photo Credit: NEON