The photographer I chose for this project, Richard Avedon, was born on May 15, 1923 in New York City, and died October 1, 2004 at the age of 81 in San Antonio, Texas. At the age of 12 he became interested in photography and joined the Young Men’s Hebrew Association (YMHA) camera club. He dropped out of high school to join the marines during WWII and served as a Photographer's Mate Second Class, mainly taking identification pictures for sailors. After leaving the marines in 1944, he attended the New School for Social Research in New York City to study photography under Alexey Brodovitch. He appears to have really liked shooting in black and white because if you search him up, most of his work is done in black and white. This adds a lot more emphasis to his dramatic images. He demanded for his models to show movement and emotion in his pictures which was a departure from the motionless fashion photography of the time. He was somewhat revolutionary in the world of fashion photography, I would say that he turned modeling into more of an art, putting more movement and emotion into his pictures in an artistic way. He was best known for his dramatic, minimalist portraits. Avedon has influenced my view of photography a lot in general. Looking through his images I saw some really amazing pictures but most of the ideas behind them would have seemed kind of strange if I hadn't seen the actual images. This has inspired me to try new things that may seem a little strange or different at first, but can produce an amazing image. I really enjoyed recreating some of his work. Working with my model was really fun and interpreting his images together was a great experience. His models had certain characteristics that were hard to recreate like in the first image, his model had a very long torso and hair that was about six inches longer than my model's hair. These physical differences made it hard to recreate the image exactly so we tried a few similar poses that were more flattering to my model and still captured the essence of the original image. In the second picture, his model had really long, spidery fingers while my model has much smaller hands. This made it difficult to recreate the exact pose. We experimented with a couple alternative, similar poses and eventually got a good shot that ended up being pretty similar to the original. In the third image, his model was double jointed in her elbow which made it hard to get the same pose. We experimented with a few alternative poses but eventually, after trying the original pose again we got this shot which was the most similar to Avedon's image.
I used my best friend for my model so taking these images was really fun and she was really helpful in trying to get them exactly right. We had a few challenges along the way but finding a way to overcome them was one of my favorite parts of this shoot. Getting the right angles to recreate the images as closely as possible was probably the hardest part for me. Avedon used angles to get the most dramatic image possible and that is something unique to his work that was hard to recreate but was really fun to experiment with. Richard Avedon was very interesting to study, both his life and his work.
I used my best friend for my model so taking these images was really fun and she was really helpful in trying to get them exactly right. We had a few challenges along the way but finding a way to overcome them was one of my favorite parts of this shoot. Getting the right angles to recreate the images as closely as possible was probably the hardest part for me. Avedon used angles to get the most dramatic image possible and that is something unique to his work that was hard to recreate but was really fun to experiment with. Richard Avedon was very interesting to study, both his life and his work.