He was a wiry New York intellectual with a Harper’s Bazaar pedigree. Avedon to stand beside rather than behind it, leaving nothing between him and his subjects. Before it stood a Deardorff 8X10, a large field camera that took extremely sharp pictures and allowed Mr. Avedon led him to a white backdrop his assistants had taped against a wall. Whatever it was they found it in Boyd Fortin, a 13-year-old with blond locks and the carcass of a rattler in his hands. Over the next few days they fanned out, scanning the faces for a certain quality - one that would eventually transfix and flummox audiences in equal measure. Avedon set out for the town of Sweetwater, home of the annual Rattlesnake Roundup.

Eager but cautious, he flew to Texas for a test run in March 1979.Īlongside two camera assistants and Laura Wilson, the Dallas photographer he’d hired to help research locations, Mr. He knew little of the West, save those same myths he’d inhaled. Avedon had achieved cover-of-Newsweek renown for his chronicling of fame, culture, power and influence in late 20th-century America. Avedon: Find something new.Ĭommissioning the 55-year-old photographer for the project was a stroke of genius and/or insanity.

It started as a lark, the large format reinvention of the American West: The director of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art was chatting with an adviser one day in 1978, a jokingly aspirational idea was lobbed - what if the biggest photographer in the world did a show with our little Fort Worth museum? But the lark had legs, a meeting was arranged and soon Richard Avedon was leaving his rarefied Upper East Side universe for gypsum plants and oil fields.Īt the time, it was a sentimental and well-worn vision that defined the West: rugged cowboys, sweeping pastoral beauty, the triumphalist, freedom-loving heart of America itself.

Avedon portraits american west