Richard Avedon Darkness and Light

 


        One scene that I found very interesting in Richard Avedon Darkness and Light can be found starting at 10:38. Here he talked about how when he worked at Bazaar magazine the people there became his “new chosen” family (10:38). Brodovitch was his newly chosen father. He explained how Brodovitch never gave compliments but he was ok with that because he said, “I didn’t believe compliments. I never believed compliments.” (11:02). He never believed in compliments, and in a way, I feel the same. I never liked compliments because I never trusted them and I never understood the need for them. Compliments are a way for people to feel good about themselves and their work. An artist shouldn’t work just to please others. The only way you know you are getting anywhere as an artist is when you get people who disagree with your work. I say this because it means you are pushing boundaries and changing the way people see things. A good example of this is Vincent van Gogh. When he was alive no one really liked his work because it was different. Now he is known as one of the best artists in the world. So when it comes to compliments I have to agree with Richard Avedon, “I don’t believe compliments.” (11:02). 


        Another scene that I found interesting was around 25:50 in Richard Avedon Darkness and Light. This is where he starts to talk about his fascination with faces. He said, “I think my eyes always went towards what I was interested in, the face.” (25:50). I liked how he compared his eyes to the eyes of an eagle, stating that his eyes zoomed into a target just like theirs. It is interesting to me because it is a primal instinct for eagle to do this with their eyes, and I guess in a way artists have been able to tap into their primal instincts to capture and record everything around them. He stated a little later that “in work, I’d look for something in a face, and what I’d look for is contradiction, complexity, things that are contradictory and at the same time connected.” (26:44). I agree that the human face is a very complex thing. There are so many different faces someone can have, and that face can change in an instant. If you think about it it’s actually very unlikely that someone will make exactly the same face more than once in their life. So when you capture someone’s face in a picture you are capturing a moment in time that will never happen again. Richard Avedon was able to do some amazing things with only a human face.

Video link: 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XElT1udbFM&feature=emb_logo

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