Richard Avedon: Portraits
Metropolitan Museum of Art
“Much like the great 19th-century French photographer, Nadar, whose telling portraits of rare individuals captured the creative genius of his generation, so Avedon, a century later, collected the key players and directed them in a brilliant portrait of an era that was questioning, unruly, and self-consciously alive, like all periods of radical growth.” Phillip de Montebello, quoted in the exhibition announcement.
Avedon’s decisions for presenting his portrait photographs evolved over time. The pictures from the 1970s were mounted between two sheets of acrylic. The “In the American West” pictures from the mid 1980s were mounted on aluminum with an exposed aluminum border. The portraits from the decade preceding this exhibition were framed by us in patinated aluminum float frames.