Today we put aside the world of female icons to talk about one of the most important person on the world of fashion and photography: Richard Avedon. Not only women have written the story of fashion, and everybody knows it. In fact, there are a lot of designers, portrait and male artists who have contributed in this creative and famous universe.

Avedon (1923-2004) was born in New York and he started making clothes when he was a child: his father had a clothing store on Five Avenue and his mother’s family owned to a textile manufacturing  company. When he was young went to the University of Columbia for a while but left to join the merchant marine US in 1942. Just before he undertook the adventure, his father gave him a camera Rolleiflex, his first instrument to start a job as a portraitist. And the end of 1940s, the important Harper’s Bazaar magazine claimed his services. He was working two decades for the american magazine until 1966, when he became the photographer of Vogue USA.

Trying to define the work of Avedon is the same as speaking of current fashion photography. On the beginng, the photography  was a way of communicating fashion, but his way of portraying was so revealing that changed the landscape and influence the creation of new collections. The “Avedon revolution” began thanks to a trip to Paris, city that inspired him to improve the fashion of the city to a new context with international projection.

He gradually began to develop an innovative, elegant and classic style but with a different point of view. The first innovation was photographing something prepared and planned but in a “emotional” scenario: to mix the street photography and the fashion photography. Something that now no longer surprise us, but it was the photograph Avedon who claimed to transmit something beyond the purely commercial value.

Thanks to an elegant but eccentric and edgy props, he brought the world of fashion theater and art and detached  the same and boring catalog photograph. Additionally, he turned these models in protagonists of these scenarios. He gave them a personality that this personality had to be portrayed in the picture.

One could also say that he was one of the fathers of minimalism. In his magnificent facet as a portraitist chose for an apparent simplicity that came marked by a new white background. However they weren’t simply portraits, Avedon proposed a strongly psychological result. He organized  long sessions with conversations up to four hours until the characters left aside tension and he could captured their features more unexpected. In front of his eyes passed these personalities: Truman Capote, Henry Miller, Humphrey Bogart or Marilyn Monroe.

The photographer not only dedicated and revolutionized the fashion. His portraits pursued a line human: to capture the simplicity and transparency, signals that indicated the experiences and inner psychology of the characters.

In 1979, parallel to his career in the world of magazines, he undertook one of his jobs most famous and important. The museum Amon Carter of Texas contracte him for a project (In the american west), he dedicated it five years to traveled of the western United States.

The goal was to document to people who never would write the history of his country: Farmers, miners, homeless, housewives … all in large-format photographs, daylight and outdoors.

Richard Avedon became part of the history as one of the most important photographers of the century XX. Someone changed the schemes and defined our image of beauty, elegance and culture. He has captured the most important moments and features of the century and he has also given voice to many people without fame or name, with: photographs of the civil rights movement of the southern United States, from protesters against the Vietnam War or the fall of the Berlin Wall. They are a great heritage for society.