There were bedraggled roughnecks in Oklahoma, a Loretta Lynn fan club in Colorado. In San Antonio and Butte and Cheyenne and Reliance they would meet miners, rodeo hands, slaughterhouse workers, bartenders, drifters, janitors and motel maids. Avedon and his team would pile into a Chevy Suburban and drive. Over the next six summers, from 1979 to 1984, Mr. Was he proud? Defensive? Was that revulsion or curiosity in his pale eyes?

Something lurked in the teen’s gracefully skeptical eyebrow, his bloodstained apron, the guarded intensity he beamed into the camera. Now, he was arranging a snake’s entrails in a boy’s hands in rural Texas. Avedon had famously captured Marilyn Monroe’s pouty glamour, Brigitte Bardot’s iconic chic, Andy Warhol’s electricity. Discomfort melted away in the face of his magnetism and infectious enthusiasm. But his ability to connect was uncanny, Ms.

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.

Richard avedon portraits american west