New Richard Avedon Documentary Shows That Fashion Isn’t All Style—It’s Substance, Too

When The Devil Wears Prada 2 hit theaters this past spring, it painted an accurate and depressing picture of how fashion publishing has dwindled, its creative juices squeezed. Miranda Priestly, is no longer calling on her assistants to ring Patrick, a reference to the fashion photographer Patrick Demarchelier, or anyone of that caliber.

As someone who spent a majority of their career in that industry and had a short stint at Vogue, the publication the “Devil Wears Prada” films were based on, it’s fair to say everyone goes in with a dream of what it means to work at a fashion magazine. Often, those fantasies are informed by the photographs of Herb Ritts, Helmut Newton, and Richard Avedon, the latter of which is the subject of a new documentary by filmmaker Ron Howard. Titled Avedon, it releases on Netflix today.

As far as fashion documentaries go, it’s full of style and substance, backed up with anecdotes from Larry Gagosian, Tina Brown, Twiggy, Hilton Als, Samira Nasr, Isabella Rossellini, Calvin Klein, Avedon’s son John, and James Martin, the executive director of the Richard Avedon Foundation. Gagosian, who represents the Richard Avedon Foundation and has just opened an Avedon show in Beverly Hills, recalls going to brunch with the photographer, where all that was served was hard-boiled eggs and champagne. “I thought it was super elegant,” says Gagosian.

Using a combination of archival footage and interviews, Howard echoes the glitz and extravagance of fashion publishing’s bygone era of hefty budgets and creative freedom: Avedon’s photoshoots for Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue would last four days, and often featured models such as Lauren Hutton, Beverly Johnson, and Penelope Tree. Avedon managed to capture not just pretty faces, but the souls and secrets behind them.

Avedon grew up reading magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar, Vanity Fair, and Vogue at his father’s women’s retail business on Fifth Avenue. In them, he found the photographs by Martin Munkácsi, Edward Steichen, and Anton Bruehl.

He got his start in the 1940s, during World War II, working as a staff photographer for the United States Maritime Service, for which photographed around 100,000 faces on plain white backgrounds for ID cards with his Rolleiflex camera. “It’s existential white, the only thing you see is the geography of the face,” Avedon says in an old interview used in the film, referring to the way he spotlit his subjects against a white background.

After the war, he took courses in graphic design and photography at the New School, where he met Harper’s Bazaar’s art director, Alexey Brodovitch, who encouraged him to go to Paris in 1947 as part of the magazine’s mandate of “bringing back the glamor of pre-war Paris.”

At that publication, Avedon bore witness to a fashion revolution. In 1947, Christian Dior presented his New Look collection, an antidote to the rationed fabrics of the war, with full pleated skirts falling below mid-calf length. Avedon, who extravagantly captured five girls swirling in their full-length skirts, says that he lit each photograph he took in Paris as though he were reconstructing a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers film.

He recalls photographing a model crying at a railway station. The picture was met with some acerbic feedback from Carmel Snow, the renowned editor-in-chief of Harper’s Bazaar, who coined the term the New Look: “Nobody cries in a Dior hat, Dick.”

Avedon’s work for Harper’s Bazaar shaped his career, paving the way for him to become a star beyond the fashion world. In 1955, he photographed one of his most famous images, Dovima with elephants; Gagosian reveals he once sold it for $2 million. By 1957, Avedon had shot to fame like Picasso (he photographed the artist in 1958) and had become the inspiration behind Stanley Donen’s film Funny Face, in which an Avedon-like photographer is played by Astaire. In a nod to the film’s inspiration, Avedon was brought on to shoot the stills used for the film’s opening credits.

Fundamentally, Avedon was always on a mission to capture the human condition. He firstly did so with stars and starlets to illustrate that nothing is really so perfect. Howard’s documentary seems to suggest that this was all related to Avedon’s own imperfect upbringing.

In Howard’s documentary, Avedon, who died in 2004, says that his parents always presented an idealized family in their scrapbooks and often borrowed a dog as a prop to exaggerate the image they cultivated. He grew up in a stern household with a father that was emotionally absent for a big chunk of his life until they reconciled later in life.

His sister Louise, was his first muse. Avedon says in the film that her “beauty affected me,” and that all the models he chose resembled his sister with their oval faces, high cheekbones, and brunette hair. Louise was catatonic and spent more than 15 years living in a psychiatric hospital, where she died in 1968 at age 42.

“One of the great themes in his work is alienation and isolation. He wants to know what’s going on inside human beings,” says John, Avedon’s son. In times of heartache, Avedon reveled in his work—such as when his first wife, the actress Doe Avedon, left him for another man that was blonde and tall, or when his second wife, Evelyn Franklin, fell into depression, leading Avedon to start living out of his studio. “Everything diminishes,” Avedon says here. “Work does not. It’s the one thing that doesn’t turn on you.”

Maybe because his life wasn’t so pretty, Avedon’s photographs didn’t always flatter. When he shot Nancy Reagan, for example, he abided by all of her handler’s guidelines. Then, in the final image, he focused on her claw-like hands, a contrast to her perfectly, smooth face.

Sometimes to get the image he wanted, he would manipulate his subjects, as he did when he shot the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (formerly King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson). Avedon told them that, on the way to the photoshoot, his taxi ran over a dog. This was a lie, but they seemed to believe it, and Avedon captured the droop in their smile. Simpson told Avedon that she would destroy him when the photos were published, but Avedon, who was Jewish, described the couple as “compassionate,” despite the fact that they sympathized with the Nazis during World War II.

It’s evident through Avedon’s line of work that the photographer saw the world beyond the pages of Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue. He waited seven weeks in Vietnam to photograph the American generals of the war; the residents of the American West and the Chicago 7 also counted among his subjects. The film portrays Avedon as a complicated figure, one whose contributions exceed the field of fashion photography.

It also portrays him as a complicated person, but it could’ve gone even further. Howard shies away from claims about Avedon’s sexuality that have been voiced in books such as Avedon: Something Personal, by Norma Stevens and Steven M. L. Aronson, and Michael Gross’s Focus: The Secret, Sexy, Sometimes Sordid World of Fashion Photographers. Gross reports that Avedon had an affair with his high school classmate, the writer James Baldwin, who even worked on a book with Avedon called Nothing Personal. That isn’t addressed here. (Avedon’s foundation vigorously disputed certain episodes described in Something Personal upon the book’s release, but it did not outright deny the descriptions of the photographer’s sexual identity.)

Howard also glosses over the fact that Avedon stopped working for Vogue when Anna Wintour replaced Grace Mirabella as editor-in-chief, moving away from his cropped headshot covers. This is also skipped over entirely.

Howard is instead more focused on the glamorous ghosts of a vanished era. The fashion industry has been consumed by capitalism, and fashion magazines have lost their ability to influence. All we’re left with is tales of the good old days and a graveyard of nostalgic images. You don’t have to look too closely to see that the devil is in the picture. For proof, just look at one of the photographs featured here: Avedon’s 1952 portrait of the actor Charlie Chaplin, who raises two fingers to his head, as though he were Satan himself.