Such interests, special in a child, suggest that he was not only precocious but unhappy quite happily he says he was: a veteran at running away from home. Except that he never went to college, never, for that matter, finished high school, even though he appears to have been rather a child prodigy, a poet of some talent, and already, from the time he was ten and the owner of a box camera, sincerely embarked on his life’s labor: the walls of his room were ceiling to floor papered with pictures torn from magazines, photographs by Munkácsi and Steichen and Man Ray.
Truman capote harold halma photograph full#
He was born in New York, and is thirty-six, though one would not think it: a skinny, radiant fellow who still hasn’t got his full growth, animated as a colt in Maytime, just a lad not long out of college. For the truth is, though loquacious, an unskimping conversationalist, the sort that zigzags like a bee ambitious to depollen a dozen blossoms simultaneously, Avedon is not, not very, articulate: he finds his proper tongue in silence, and while maneuvering a camera-his voice, the one that speaks with admirable clarity, is the soft sound of the shutter forever freezing a moment focused by his perception.
His brown and deceivingly normal eyes, so energetic at seeing the concealed and seizing the spirit, ceasing the flight of a truth, a mood, a face, are the important features: those, and his born-to-be absorption in his craft, photography, without which the unusual eyes, and the nervously sensitive intelligence supplying their power, could not dispel what they distillingly imbibe. An adequate description to add is sheer flourish. Richard Avedon is a man with gifted eyes. The essay, titled “On Richard Avedon,” was published this week in Art in America: Writings From the Age of Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and Minimalism (Library of America). Included in the volume was this essay about Avedon’s work written by Truman Capote, who also supplied text accompanying Avedon’s photographs. In 1959, Richard Avedon published his first collection of portraits, Observations.
0 kommentar(er)
