Avedon at the DIA

Barbara Mullen, hat by Lilly Dache¦ü, New York, April 1951

Fashion and photography are the synchronized swim team of contemporary art. There are those who say they complement each other perfectly; others maintain that the camera is wasted on "the loaded deck of the superficial," as one critic put it.
 
The latter group, however, have always acknowledged that Richard Avedon knew how to play a good hand with the cards he was dealt. And if you should ask any red-blooded male how he reacted when he first saw that seductive snapshot of Nastassja Kinski with a serpent ... well, let's just say there's a lot to be said for loaded decks.
 
And Avedon understood something that many of his contemporaries never grasped. Fashion is what you put ON and style is what you put INTO what you put on. The new exhibit at the Detroit Institute of Arts, with more than 200 photos taken between 1944 and 2000, is not just a timeline of changing hemlines.

Avedon wanted his pictures to communicate the emotional freshness of fashion - especially the freshness that typified the post-war Parisian market. His models (and the occasional celebrity who got into the act) are not mere flesh and blood mannequins, but people with genuine presence; the lens was just as sharply focused on them as on the clothes they were wearing.

And if you bear in mind that these photos also reflect the tempo (and temper) of their respective time periods, you have a subtle lesson about modern history as well as modern art.
 
A special note: Avedon was also one of the first to work with and promote African-American fashion models. One of them, the very beautiful Donyale Luna, was a native of Detroit.
 
Avedon Fashion Photographs 1944-2000, October 18 to January 17

by Robert Del Valle/Special to Metromix