Avedon Something Personal [Hardcover]

An intimate biography of Richard Avedon, the legendary fashion and portrait photographer who “helped define America’s image of style, beauty and culture” (The New York Times), by his longtime collaborator and business partner Norma Stevens and award-winning author Steven M. L. Aronson.

Richard Avedon was arguably the world’s most famous photographer—as artistically influential as he was commercially successful. Over six richly productive decades, he created landmark advertising campaigns, iconic fashion photographs (as the star photographer forHarper’s BazaarandthenVogue), groundbreaking books, and unforgettable portraits of everyone who was anyone. He also went on the road to find and photograph remarkable uncelebrated faces, with an eye toward constructing a grand composite picture of America.

Avedon dazzled even his most dazzling subjects. He possessed a mystique so unique it was itself a kind of genius—everyone fell under his spell. But the Richard Avedon the world saw was perhaps his greatest creation: he relentlessly curated his reputation and controlled his image, managing to remain, for all his exposure, among the most private of celebrities.

No one knew him better than did Norma Stevens, who for thirty years was his business partner andclosest confidant. InAvedon: Something Personal—equal parts memoir, biography, and oral history, including an intimate portrait of the legendary Avedon studio—Stevens and co-author Steven M. L. Aronson masterfully trace Avedon’s life from his birth to his death, in 2004, at the age of eighty-one, while at work in Texas forThe New Yorker(whose first-ever staff photographer he had become in 1992).

The book contains startlingly candid reminiscences by Mike Nichols, Calvin Klein, Claude Picasso, Renata Adler, Brooke Shields, David Remnick, Naomi Campbell, Twyla Tharp, Jerry Hall, MiklÕ