Avedon Is a Gracefully Constructed Documentary About a Great American Photographer

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Narrated by TIME AI.

Richard Avedon, whose career began in the early 1940s and ended with his death, following a cerebral hemorrhage, in 2004, was one of the greatest fashion photographers of his era. Even if you think you don’t care about fashion, you’ve probably been awed by his 1955 Dovima With Elephants, in which the supermodel Dovima, draped in a two-tone Dior gown, stands regally between two pachyderms, her arms outstretched as if to read their magnificence with her fingertips. Compositionally, it’s perfect. But it also links the inherent splendor of human creativity and beauty with the even more overwhelming grandeur of the animal kingdom. It’s fashion photography as spiritual meditation.

Being a great fashion photographer would have been enough. But as Ron Howard’s gracefully constructed documentary Avedon shows, Richard Avedon’s way of looking at the human face and body informed everything he achieved in his roughly 50-year career, from capturing the quicksilver essence of public figures like Malcolm X, Ronald and Nancy Reagan, and Henry Kissinger, to catching Marilyn Monroe in a moment where, rather than playing to the camera, she seems lost in a private world where no one can follow. As Avedon’s son, John, says in the film, “He exalts the individual. His work is very much about trying to discover himself in other people’s faces, in other people’s lives.”

Avedon makes a fine introduction to both the man and the artist. Though he would always love the theatricality of fashion photography, he also made pictures that functioned as social protest. In 1939 African American opera singer Marian Anderson had been barred from singing in Washington’s Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution, who cited a white-performers-only policy. It was an outrage that had long troubled Avedon. In 1963 he had the chance to photograph members of the DAR at a convention, showing a group of women in dowdy gowns, smug with self-certainty; one of them, caught off-guard, actually has her back to the camera. It can’t be the kind of portrait any of them were hoping for.

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Through juxtaposition of images and voice-over recordings from Avedon himself, Avedon offers insight into the photographer’s mode of working. His preference was to capture subjects in front of a plain white background. Around the time of his project In the American West, completed in 1984, he explained, “One cowboy against a white background represents all cowboys. Whereas if he’s leaning against a fence post, he’s just a cowboy.”

And what about Avedon the man? He grew up in Manhattan, the son of an emotionally withholding father; he had siblings, including a younger sister, Louise, whom he adored, and who struggled for most of her life with mental illness. Even as a kid, he loved photographing Louise, who was exceedingly beautiful. When he was 9, he took a photographic negative of one of those pictures, taped it to his shoulder, and spent the day in the sun. By evening, his sister’s image had been recorded on his skin.

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It’s a strange, touching story, especially considering that Louise would become more withdrawn over the years, and would eventually be diagnosed with schizophrenia. A photographic image can be explained, strictly speaking, by science. But it’s also a place for ghosts of both people we once knew and those we never had the chance to meet. Avedon left many of those ghost pictures behind, from joyful images of the models who also became longtime friends, like Lauren Hutton and Isabella Rossellini, to striking portraits of blazing stars like Picasso and Ella Fitzgerald, as well as fading comets like the older, 1950s-era Buster Keaton. Avedon is a road map through his career, a lifetime of looking at faces and striving to capture the life that animates them, before it vanishes forever.