Over the weekend I viewed the Richard Avedon exhibit, Portraits of Power at the Corcoran. This is definitely one of the most impressive exhibits of Avedon’s work that I have seen. Organized mostly by era, it is an ebb and flow of likenesses of the most influential (whether for benefit or the adverse) individuals of 20th century American culture. The show seems to perpetuate the aura of anxiousness that classifies our current times, and forces the viewer to confront both where our nation came from and where it is going. Most of all, I appreciated seeing Avedon’s 1976 project ‘The Family’ in its entirety. Images of the most prominent men and women at the time of the 1976 presidential election, ‘The Family’, evokes the time unlike anything else I can think of, and does so in a ‘factual’ yet clearly Avedonesque style.

Copyright The Richard Avedon Foundation

October 20th, 2008 | Uncategorized