1985-1995

Photography had long been a puzzle to The New Yorker, even a thorn in Eustace Tilley’s side. When Tina Brown arrived as the editor, in 1992, and wanted to use photography regularly in these pages, she needed something that would be visually arousing and still within the magazine’s vision of itself. (It was treacherous ground; a few wan photographs illustrating a piece on “bug art,” in 1987, had been hugely controversial.) The problem seemed baffling, but the answer could be found in one word and that word was Avedon.

Richard Avedon had been a passionate reader of the magazine, week after week, for more than fifty years—a much more passionate reader than many of us who merely worked for it. He had been a Profile subject in the fifties, and then a subject of Janet Malcolm’s searching photography criticism. More important, he had an intuitive, intrinsic sense of what was right for the magazine and what was not. “A wild exactitude” was Joseph Mitchell’s brief, perfect formula for high New Yorker style—facticity in a solution of fanaticism, observation at the service of obsession—and Avedon had pursued that ideal all his working life.

He loved the fact of human faces as they were, uncosmeticized and unidealized and coolly inspected, but his passion lay in dramatizing the truths those faces contained. He always maintained that, had he not been a photographer, he would have been a movie or theatre director. And, with a matchless, almost manic energy, he began to do wonderfully theatrical photographs for the magazine: Kevin Kline as Falstaff, Salman Rushdie as Balzac, Norman Mailer as himself. Then there were the long photo essays—including the last, outrageous fashion essay of his career, a memento-mori statement about the illusions of style showing a skeleton in love, in every way, with a young woman. Avedon was on the road for the magazine, working on a political album, called “Democracy,” when he died, camera in hand, in 2004. Of all the honors he had received, he once said, having been the first staff photographer for The New Yorker came close to the top.