Research - Richard Avedon

Richard Avedon born in New York, began his photographic work working as an advertising photographer for a department store, but was soon discovered by Alexey Brodovitch, by 1948 he had set up his own studio and began providing images for magazines such as Vogue and Life, from this he focused mainly on fashion photography, this was still the early days of photography and so his images were black and white, also with the soft texture to the pictures.

Richard Avedon's work captures the up most of elegance in his models and in general. His work seems to be carefully thought about in material of the items of clothing the models, usual female, would wear, as he creates soft, flowing, movement in the fabric with also capturing the dramatic intensity that comes through in his work.

I like that his work seems romantic but with an edge, as the sense he creates of women being noticed by everyone but not noticing this themselves. I want to try and focus like him on how the picture is set up in urban enviroments and I definitely want to look at how I could have my own take on his expressive foregrounds.

The Images of his that I want to draw the most influence from or recreate are three movement photographes, the first, of the women with the umbrella, I like this as he has made her look as if a ballerina doing the most simplest of things as stepping of a pavement, combined with the umbrella makes it seem as if she could float away, the model being lowly lighted and the foreground so light and detailed makes the model be extremely dominant, which could be easy with a background so eye catching to loose the model amongst it. The second with the women turning on stairs, this is almost empowering, it gives a sense of not just elegance but feminine ambition on a whole, she also has this large sense of dominance in the picture and the soft, gentle flow of the skirt gives the picture the same feeling when you look at it. The last is the female model on her own jumping in the air, I like again the movement of the dress she is wear and that he made thought to make her jump in the first place, capturing this one moment in which the fabric was able to fully show it's textures and lightness.