Somehow I missed this (Avedon)

Richard Avedon passed away a week ago. The New York Times describes him as a "fashion photographer," but I know him primarily from The New Yorker, where his were the first photographs used in that venerable publication (replacing line drawings and the like) and matched its highbrow aesthetic perfectly. I could almost always recognize an Avedon photo (the studio shots at least), not just in the trademark way that he printed the shots with the edges of the negatives included, for a rough-proof look, but in the way his pictures captured not just the textures of his subjects but their personalities, their self-images. People would pose doing remarkable things, for photos worth collecting into an album, and they were fully present in the frame, warts and all.

The LA Times write-up includes a gallery of some of his work. Whew! check out George Wallace "and his valet" below (click for whole photo)...

"Avedon gave us the pared-down study of the famous person, a stripped-away look at their humanity," said Arthur Ollman, director of the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, in an interview earlier this year with The Times. "It is portraiture as interrogation."

Adam Gopnik, for The New Yorker:
As long as people remain curious about life in the twentieth century, they will turn to Avedon's photographs to see how it looked, and what it meant.