If the renowned fashion-and-portrait photographer Richard Avedon had listed his relationship status with cameras on Facebook—a platform launched just months before his death, in 2004—he likely would have chosen “It’s complicated.” As he confessed in his book with Truman Capote, Observations (1959), “I hate cameras. They interfere, they’re always in the way. I wish: if I just could work with my eyes alone!”
Given that Avedon went from a Kodak Brownie, which he used as a tween member of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association Camera Club, to the Rolleiflex twin-lens he used to shoot his first assignment for Harper’s Bazaar’s Junior Bazaar (after finally landing a meeting with the magazine’s art director, Alexey Brodovitch, on his 14th try), to the large-format, 8-by-10 view cameras he used for portraits, you’d expect him to think of a camera as an extra limb. Not Avedon. He sought to capture something more than the subject in front of the lens.
