A new Netflix documentary arrives today, Wednesday, November 11, and it is about a man who changed what a photograph could do. 'Avedon,' directed by Ron Howard, tells the story of Richard Avedon, the American photographer who put movement into fashion photography and honesty into portraiture — and who, over a career that ran from the 1940s into the 2000s, photographed almost everyone who mattered, from Marilyn Monroe to the Beatles to American presidents.
The Man Who Made Fashion Move
Before Avedon, fashion photography was mostly statues: models posed stiffly in studios, elegant and untouchable. Avedon threw that out. His models jumped, laughed, ran and danced — most famously in his 1955 photograph of Dovima in a Dior gown, leaping between two circus elephants. He shot for Harper's Bazaar and then for Vogue, and for decades his work defined what glamour looked like in print. The camera, in his hands, stopped recording clothes and started recording joy.
The Portraits That Stripped People Bare
The other half of Avedon's career was the portrait, and it was the opposite of flattery. He photographed his subjects against a plain white background, with nothing to hide behind — no props, no scenery, no soft light. The results were famous and sometimes uncomfortable: a weary Marilyn Monroe, a laughing Charlie Chaplin, a haunted Ezra Pound. His most ambitious project, 'In the American West,' took him across the American West in the early 1980s, photographing drifters, miners, truckers and roustabouts with the same unsparing attention he gave to movie stars.
His most ambitious project, “In the American West,” took that same unsparing eye on the road. In the early 1980s Avedon traveled across the American West photographing drifters, miners, truckers, roustabouts and oil-field workers — ordinary people, shot with the same attention he gave to movie stars, against the same white background. The portraits were exhibited at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth in 1985, and they changed how America saw itself: the West was not cowboys and sunsets, it was weathered faces and work clothes, and it was beautiful. Avedon died in 2004, at 81, while on assignment for The New Yorker in Texas — on the road, with a camera, doing the work he had done for sixty years.
The White Background
The white background was not a style choice — it was a method. Avedon believed that a person photographed against nothing would eventually stop performing, because there was nothing to perform with. No desk to lean on, no skyline to borrow, no costume to hide inside. What was left was the face, and the face, held long enough under a camera, gives up the truth. That is why his portraits feel so different from the magazine covers around them: the famous people in them look less like celebrities and more like people caught in the act of being themselves. It is also why the portraits could be cruel. Avedon did not flatter his subjects into comfort. He waited them out. The white background made every portrait a confession — and the confession, more often than not, was the most interesting thing about the person in front of him.
Why Ron Howard, Why Now
Howard is a natural fit for the material: a director who has spent his career making big American stories feel intimate, from 'Apollo 13' to his documentaries on the Beatles and Pavarotti. Avedon's life is that kind of story — a kid from a New York clothing family who became the most famous photographer in the world, and who never stopped asking what a picture could reveal about the person in front of the lens. He started at Harper's Bazaar in the 1940s, working under the legendary art director Alexey Brodovitch, who taught him that a fashion photograph could be a piece of design and a piece of theater at the same time. From there he went to Vogue, to The New Yorker, and to the American West — and he never once photographed the way he was told to.
What Else Arrives Today
If documentaries are not your speed, today brings more. Netflix also adds 'The Gospel of Christmas' and 'How to Fall in Love by Christmas' today, and Prime Video adds 'The Book of Clarence,' the 2024 biblical comedy starring LaKeith Stanfield. But 'Avedon' is the one with the weight of history behind it — a film about a man whose photographs taught the whole world how to look. Put it at the top of the list tonight. If you only know Avedon from a single famous image — the leaping Dovima, the laughing Chaplin, the weary Monroe — the film will show you the man behind all three, and the lifetime of looking that connected them. The camera, as Avedon proved, never lies — it just waits for the moment the subject forgets it is there.
