by Jeremy Hatch
Renowned, late photographer Richard Avedon is being honored through December 27th with an exhibition at the Fraenkel Gallery (49 Geary). It's the first exhibition of Avedon's photographs the gallery has staged since his death in 2004:
Although Richard Avedon first earned his reputation as a fashion photographer, perhaps his greatest achievement was his reinvention of the genre of photographic portraiture. The concept of "performance," in both life and art, was one of his central concerns. He photographed actors and comedians, pop stars and divas, musicians and dancers, artists in all mediums whose public lives were essentially performances. Many of the most celebrated cultural figures of the last fifty years passed before Avedon's camera.The exhibit includes "approximately fifty original prints as well as contact sheets, work prints, album covers, and other ephemera." It's a bit of an appetizer for the major retrospective that SFMoMA is reportedly planning to put on about a year from now.
Coincidentally, Annie Liebowitz (whom we wrote about some time back) -- a photographer whose work is closely related to Avedon's -- will speak at the Herbst Theater on Monday night for the
Image: The Richard Avedon Foundation, "Marilyn Monroe, New York City, May 6, 1957"
