Richard Avedon, the Eye of Fashion, Dies at 81

Richard Avedon, whose fashion and portrait photographs helped define
America's image of style, beauty and culture for the last
half-century, died yesterday in a hospital in San Antonio. He was 81
and lived in Manhattan.

The cause was complications of a cerebral hemorrhage suffered last
Saturday, said his son, John. Mr. Avedon was in Texas on assignment
for The New Yorker magazine, which hired him in 1992 as its first
staff photographer. He had been working on a portfolio called
"Democracy,'' an election-year project that included coverage of the
presidential nominating conventions.

Mr. Avedon's photographs captured the freedom, excitement and energy
of fashion as it entered an era of transformation and popularization.
No matter what the prevailing style, his camera eye always found a way
to dramatize its spirit as the fashion world's creative attention
swayed variously from the "New Look" of liberated Paris to pragmatic
American sportswear designed in New York, and from the
anti-establishment fashion of London's Carnaby Street to
sophisticated, tailored dresses and suits from Milan.

Picking up the trail of such photographic forerunners as Martin
Munkacsi, Mr. Avedon revolutionized the 20th-century art of fashion
photography, imbuing it with touches of both gritty realism and
outrageous fantasy and instilling it with a relentlessly experimental
drive. So great a hold did Mr. Avedon's fashion photography come to
have on the public imagination that when he was in his 30's he was the
inspiration for Dick Avery, the fashion photographer played by Fred
Astaire in the 1957 film "Funny Face." In 1978 he appeared on the
cover of Newsweek while a retrospective exhibition of his work was on
display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Regards,
Sanjeev Narang

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