Desert Living, February 2008

Some 300 years before Richard Avedon was born, the Dutch art patron Contantijn Huygens gushed over the camera obscura (the great-great-grandfather of the point-and-shoot), "this is life itself—or something more elevated." It seems a perfect fit for Avedon, a man whose work is the essence of photography—images so life-like, they seem almost too real.

Avedon, who died in 2004, started out taking photos for fashion mags like Harper's and Vogue. Full of motion and often elaborately staged, they're irresistibly eye-catching. These seem a far cry from his other well-known body of work—stark, moody portraits—but check out the new exhibition at the Phoenix Art Museum, "Richard Avedon: Photographer of Influence," and you'll see more similarities than differences. The Museum displays both halves of Avedon's oeuvre, showing that what he knew best was not so much photography, though his images do have remarkable balance and poise, but people. His magazine work stuns us because he knew his audience; his portraits because he knew his subjects.

Avedon understood that when we flip through the glossies, we're not just looking at clothes. By putting his models in action, by giving them parts to play and scenes in which to play them, he created entire glamorous narratives in which we can get lost. His portraits are another side of the same coin. As Rebecca Senf, the show's curator, explains, "they weren't just a matter of plunking someone down in front of the camera." Instead, Avedon made a point of engaging with his subjects, talking to them, and drawing them out. The *click* of the shutter was almost an afterthought.

Like his fashion shots, the portraits capture moments of emotion that we can connect to on a very human level. The dresses might cost five months' rent, the cultural icons we might only know from TV, but, as Senf says, "we can look at a portrait of Marilyn Monroe or Bob Dylan and say, ‘yeah, I know that feeling.'"