After Sherrie Levine, After Richard Avedon

Currently on view at SF MoMA is a retrospective of photographer Richard Avedon.  Here's the breakdown on MoMA's website: 

Whether photographing politicians, artists, writers, fashion models, or movie stars, Richard Avedon revolutionized the genre of portraiture. He rejected conventional stiff-and-staid poses and instead captured both motion and emotion in the faces of his subjects, often encapsulating their intrigue in a single charged moment. SFMOMA is proud to be the only U.S. venue for this retrospective that spans the artist's remarkable career. Featuring nearly 200 photographs along with a selection of vintage magazines, the exhibition presents work ranging from Avedon's earliest street scenes to his breakthrough 1950s Paris fashion pictures and the iconic celebrity portraits that brought him world renown. This in-depth retrospective reveals Avedon's singular ability to blur the lines between photojournalism, fashion photography, and fine art.

As a photographer primarily known for his "breakthrough 1950s Paris fashion pictures" and "iconic celebrity portraits," Avedon is a photographer working outside the strata of both art photography as well as postmodern photography (as per our discussion of Solomon-Godeau's "Photography After Art Photography").   The photographs featured in this retrospective had a very distinctive character: all were  iconographic images of human subjects, or, portraits.  Of all the conversations I overheard as I walked through crowded exhibition, not a single one was about Avedon's images.  It was clear that people were much more interested in discussing Avedon's subjects, a who's who of 20th century cultural icons.  Where much of the postmodern photography we examined in class were photographic re-presentations, Avedon's photographs were all, simply put, presentations.

After Sherrie Levine, After Richard Avedon