The Children of Grandy Park series drew inspiration from several sources. Cartier-Bresson should of course be assumed. The media distillation of Henri’s wandering, anarchic intuition down to the so-called “Decisive Moment” continues to this day to mold photographers and critical opinions of their efforts through the sheer force of repeated publication and quotation. Man Ray’s experimentations too deserve at the very least a nod. While most of his fascination with using harsh light to create abstractions was ignored, strong illumination in the form of sunlight certainly found its way into the Grandy Park series regularly. A desire to emulate Edward Weston’s superb, masterful modeling and Robert Doisneau’s insightful depiction of human nature is also present. Walker Evans is there. Irving Penn is there. Helen Levitt and Lisette Model are there too. Despite them all, it is Richard Avedon’s reportage and portraiture that most prominently figure and are most readily visible in the portraits that compose The Children of Grandy Park.

Often working on a stark white background that became signature, Avedon consistently produced portraits at once startlingly beautiful and painfully unflattering. Through the counterintuitive procedure of underexposing his negatives while shooting his subjects then overprocessing the film once it reached the darkroom, he achieved an exaggerated contrast and illusion of exquisite sharpness otherwise nearly impossible during the era. Many times his photographs were composed with a minimum of direction given to his subjects. On other occasions, he studiously refrained from looking through the viewfinder as he made his exposures.

RichardAvedon.com describes his method while shooting the renowned The Family (a Rolling Stone Magazine launched project to record the U.S. Presidential campaign coincidentally occurring during the nation’s 200^th anniversary) this way:

Avedon avoided expressing his personal opinions of his subjects by allowing them to choose their own pose and clothing, so that his biases would not skew the resulting photograph.

Nine years later Avedon provided a personally penned, brief but invaluable description of the technique he used for In the American West. That book too was a commission. Mitchell A. Wilder, Director of the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, noticed a photograph Avedon had made of a ranch foreman known by the name Wilbur Powell as part of a series shot in Ennis, Montana in 1978. Seeking to expand the museum’s collection of notable 19^th and 20^th century photographs of western culture, Wilder offered Avedon an Amon Carter Museum sponsorship should he elect to continue the project. Avedon accepted and, despite Wilder’s death the next year, continued photographing for five summers. So far as I’m aware, even an excerpt of Avedon’s essay on his approach to shooting In the American West has only been available in the difficult-to-obtain book itself until this blog post.

This is how these portraits were made. I photograph my subject against a sheet of white paper about nine feet wide by seven feet long that is secured to a wall, a building, sometimes the side of a trailer. I work in the shade because sunshine creates shadows, highlights, accents on a surface that seem to tell you where to look. I want the source of light to be invisible so as to neutralize its role in the appearance of things.

I use an 8 x 10 view camera on a tripod, not unlike the camera used by Curtis, Brady, or Sander, except for the speed of the shutter and film. I stand next to the camera, not behind it, several inches to the left of the lens and about four feet from the subject. As I work I must imagine the pictures I am taking because, since I do not look through the lens, I never see precisely what the film records until the print is made. I am close enough to touch the subject and there is nothing between us except what happens as we observe one another during the making of the portrait. This exchange involves manipulations, submissions. Assumptions are reached and acted upon that could seldom be made with impunity in ordinary life.

– Richard Avedon

Avedon’s intention in mentioning manipulation is not simply to costume his methods in mystery. He was in fact known (some would say notoriously so) for his capacity to quite expertly toy with the emotions of his subjects when he saw fit. Celebrated celebrity photographer Annie Leibovitz said of him in retrospect in 2008, “Avedon seduced his subjects with conversation.” Avedon speaking on the topic in the 1996, Helen Whitney directed PBS documentary Richard Avedon: Darkness and Light said, “There are times when it’s necessary to trick a sitter into what you want. But never for the sake of the trick.”

I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as king as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love.

– Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David or Edward VIII

Six decades prior on November 16^th – while “Dick” Avedon was an unknown, skinny, twelve-year-old avid autograph collector – the famously dim, amorous, hopelessly romantic bachelor King Edward VIII privately revealed, to thoroughly dismayed British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, his plans to wed an American, twice over divorcée-to-be named Wallis Simpson. Once informed, the British government and all its Dominions (save the indifferent Irish) found Edward’s proposed marriage an affront. The very notion flew in the face of the Church of England’s religious teachings and ultimately challenged, through emerging legal technicalities, the British Cabinet’s right and the right of all governments under British Dominion to have a say in such matters pursuant to the Statute of Westminster 1931. What made His Highness’ designs yet more abominable to his subjects (who by now were well-informed) was the fact that both of Mrs. Simpson’s ex-husbands would still be alive when the King wed her. The former Prince of Wales had three choices left in hand: refrain for all time from marrying Simpson, enter into nuptials with Mrs. Simpson and thereby most assuredly inspire the resignation of the entire British government in protest, or abdicate his Throne.

On December 10, 1936, as part of a progression of formalities carried on in a fashion reminiscent of a Shakespearian play, Edward VIII placed his signature and seal on documents confirming his abdication in the presence of his brothers Prince Albert, Duke of York, Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, and Prince George, Duke of Kent. Two days later, the newly ascended King George VI (formerly Prince Albert) announced his plans to restore Edward to the British Orders of Knighthood while simultaneously creating him “Duke of Windsor.”

I am certain through him permanent friendly relations could have been achieved. If he had stayed, everything would have been different. His abdication was a severe loss for us.

– Adolf Hitler in 1937 commenting on Edward’s departure from the British Throne

A few days shy of seven months later Edward, Duke of Windsor at last married the Duchess at Château de Candé in Monts, Indre-et-Loire a few miles south of Tours, France. The Duke, in exile from his former Kingdom and barred as a Royal from running for election to the House of Commons or expressing his political opinions in the House of Lords, the Duchess formally deprived of the title “Her Royal Highness” along with the respect incumbent, and the both of them excluded from the “Civil List” (a kind of multi-million dollar, government funded welfare program for British Royals) they spent their retirement-like time touring France and meeting Adolf Hitler at his retreat in the Obersalzberg in Bavaria – Edward greeting Hitler with a full Nazi salute.

In September of 1939 Lord Mountbatten summoned Edward back to an England embroiled in WWII. Promoted promptly to the rank of Major-General upon return, Edward served his country a mere four months before allegedly leaking to Hitler the Allied defense plans for Belgium. The Windsors soon after fled south to the estate of a wealthy countryman with mixed Axis and Allied loyalties. Along the way the Windsors requested that the German military protect their homes in Paris and the Riviera. Hitler complied.

After Edward granted an interview as rife with inflammatory comments as General Stanley McChrystal’s very recent Rolling Stones magazine piece, Prime Minister Winston Churchill sent a British warship to French shores under orders to retrieve and convey the Windsors to the Bahamas where Edward would serve as Governor and hopefully inflict significantly less damage on the overall war effort. While there Edward cast aspersions on the intelligence of the brown-skinned populace as well as Étienne Dupuch editor of the Nassau Daily Tribune saying, “It must be remembered that Dupuch is more than half Negro, and due to the peculiar mentality of this Race, they seem unable to rise to prominence without losing their equilibrium.”

In the 1950s and 60s the couple spent the last part of their lives in “café society;” hosting parties, granting brief interviews, gambling in world-class casinos, flying to New York from Paris and back, posing for photographs, and dutifully appearing at parties hosted by socialites of sufficient stature. It was during this period that the Windsors met a 33-year-old Jewish-Russian American who had “emerged as fashion photography’s brightest star.” His name was Richard Avedon.

I would go every night to the casino in Nice and I watched them. I’d watch the way she was with him, the way he was with her, the way they were with people. I wanted to bring out the loss of humanity in them. Not the meanness – and there was a lot of meanness and a lot of narcissism – so that I knew exactly what I had to try accomplish during the sitting.

I photographed them in their hotel suite in New York, and they had their pug dogs which they adored, and they had they’re Ladies Home Journal cover faces on. They were posing royally and nothing, not for a second, was anything that I’d observed when they were gambling presented to me. And I did a kind of… its like living by your wits. I knew they loved they’re dogs. And I said, ‘If I seem a little hesitant or a little disturbed it’s because my taxi ran over a dog.’ And both of their faces dropped because they loved dogs… a lot more than they loved Jews.

The expression on their faces is true because you can’t evoke an expression that doesn’t come out of the life of the person.

– Richard Avedon speaking on his controversial 1957 portrait of the Windsors nearly forty years later

Avedon was relentless and unforgiving in his pursuit of a telling portrait regardless of whether his subject was a polished celebrity or an anonymous coal miner. A twelve-year-old Coloradan girl named Sandra Bennett and a soot-covered mine worker named James Story and a Texan trucker named Billy Mudd were portrayed with the same revealing, perhaps violating examination unleashed upon Dorothy Parker, Oscar Levant, Marilyn Monroe, Katherine Hepburn, Audrey Hepburn, President Eisenhower, President Reagan, Baroness Blixen aka Isak Denison, Charlie Chaplin, Andy Warhol, and even Avedon’s own father as he lay near death. To say “the picture’s the thing” when attempting to explain Avedon’s arguably obsessive behavior would be an oversimplification. There was much more complexity, consciousness, and tooth to what he did.

In 1996 Avedon addressed what many people saw as an uncomfortable peculiarity about him – his tendency to stare. “Different animals have different kinds of eyes for accomplishing what their goals are,” he said, “An eagle has a literal zoom lens in the eye so that from way above he can zoom down on the rodent that he’s going to attack. In the same way I think that my eyes always went toward what I was interested in; the face.” It is, to say the least, interesting that Avedon likened himself to a wild predator swooping in from above to take the life (or its accumulated affects) of whomsoever he chose as target.

Prominent author and photography critic Owen Edwards said of Avedon, “To sit with Avedon and have him look at you is a fairly disconcerting experience because you realize that he’s studying you.

“I don’t know whether he’s seeing inside you or not. I guess he would say he’s not. But he wants to see everything there is to see on that surface… and this has been the making of him as a photographer.

“The strongest thing that Avedon’s portraiture represents is a belief that finally in the end there’s nothing but the face. And the truth is that the power of the landscape of the face – the crevices and the valleys and the promontories and all of the things that they represent – it’s really how we know each other. There’s nothing on Earth more fascinating than the human face.”

This is the second installment of a look back on the award-winning Children of Grandy Park series.