What he found was hardship, and a grim gulf between frontier mythology and reality.

“And when I went out west I looked and none of it was there.” Avedon said in a 1985 interview with The Washington Post. And Cole Porter - ‘Don’t Fence Me In.’ And Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey and Marlboro men,” Mr. “I grew up with John Wayne and Gary Cooper. Something unfamiliar was coming into focus. In the set of a jaw or the searchingness of a squint you could make out the parched rangeland or the old copper pit or the vanishing farm jobs. He posed each before that white backdrop the West itself would be absent from the portraits, except that it wasn’t. While he was on the road - at county fairs and truck stops - he sought out ordinary people emitting extraordinary qualities: beauty, heartbreak, some holy combination. Avedon’s portraits once again they will hang until Oct. Avedon’s birth, the Carter Museum mounted 13 of Mr. This spring, in one of many shows nationwide honoring the centennial of Mr. 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.

This article is part of our Museums special section about how art institutions are reaching out to new artists and attracting new audiences.

Richard avedon andy warhol portrait