Photos: Some of the photos on display at the Norton

More: Information on the Avedon exhibit at the Norton

Richard Avedon died the way he lived: working.

He was 81 when he collapsed in Texas in 2004, shortly after shooting photographs of burn victims in a VA hospital for a series about American lives. He had long since abandoned the 8-x-10 view camera that he began working with 60 years before, and was still using his beloved Rolleiflex.

But the work he was doing at the end of his life, more or less a dive into the starkest Diane Arbus land, was a long way from the fashion photography with which he earned fame and a fair amount of fortune.

“Avedon Fashion 1944-2000” is now at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach. It’s a sizable sampling of work that Paul Roth, the director of the Avedon Foundation, calls “completely innovative, profoundly beautiful. These are transformative works.”

Avedon’s photographs are much less about fashion, much more about his responses to the models and his decisions about the freshest way to showcase them. There is usually movement — Avedon had a way of exploding the frame, which in and of itself made his work stand out in the usually staid, posed fashion photography of the period. There is also usually some sort of story. In short, something is always happening, but there’s never a feeling of gimmickry.

Avedon was comfortable with fashion because he was born into it — his father was in the rag trade. After service in the merchant marines during WWII, Avedon’s first pictures appeared in Harper’s Bazaar in 1944, when he was all of 21 years old.
In his early years he was fond of stark juxtapositions, as with his famous photo of the invariably sleek Dovima, who to modern eyes looks a little like Morticia Addams, posing amid the rough skins and immense dignity of a crew of elephants. Or, for that matter, Elize Daniels in Balenciaga posed amid Paris street performers in 1948.

“Avedon introduced the idea of narrative into photography,” says Vince Aletti of the International Center of Photography. “He cast his pictures like a film director.”

Which reminds you that Avedon essentially art directed the Fred Astaire/Audrey Hepburn musical Funny Face, which was a mild takeoff on his life.

As he matured, and commanded bigger budgets, Avedon’s photographs began to resemble comprehensive theatrical visions: shoots done at Maxim’s featured Audrey Hepburn and Art Buchwald; shoots at the Moulin Rouge featured Buster Keaton, Roger Vadim, Mel Ferrer and Zsa Zsa Gabor.

“Everything was a scene in his head from his movie called Paris,” the model Dorian Leigh said.

The wonder, then, is not that Avedon did Funny Face, but that he didn’t do a dozen other movies besides, up to and including directing. But photography can be controlled by one man, and movies, unless your name is Chaplin, really can’t.
“Movies might have been too diffuse for him,” says Carol Squiers, curator at the International Center of Photography. “He liked the compressed image.”

The point was not to showcase the clothes, the point was to create interesting images — an Avedon photograph rarely services anybody but Avedon. The clothes? They came second. “Dress designers,” said Avedon, “lent me textures, shapes, patterns that became an ally of my true work, which was always about women — what was going on beneath their clothes, beneath the hats. In their heads.”

This is clearly shown in a hilarious series that Avedon did for Vogue in 1962 — he left Harper’s Bazaar around the time Diana Vreeland did — with the ravishing Suzy Parker and Mike Nichols as movie stars pursued by the paparazzi in Rome, with Avedon doing a faultless simulation of the long-lens photo style and self-dramatizing celebrities that were de rigueur in the La Dolce Vita era.

As might be imagined of a photographer who dies of old age while on assignment, Avedon was the sort of workaholic who makes other workaholics nervous. Vacations barely existed; he would do five or six sittings a day, then follow it up by going to a play that he would see a half dozen times because he was going to photograph the stars.

Likewise, reading a book meant only that he was going to photograph the author. He would work until he overworked, then collapse and recuperate at a cottage he had on Montauk. A couple of weeks of that, and the compulsion took root again.
Because his work was his life, Avedon was always up for change, and he launched himself into the different styles that came out of Swinging London with photos featuring Twiggy, Penelope Tree or Anjelica Huston. (The exhibit features a couple of shots that certainly aren’t fashion and aren’t easily categorized, such as an erotic close-up of Lauren Hutton smoking a joint — a shot rejected by Vogue).

Avedon resisted change in one area only. The vast majority of the exhibit is in black and white, which is odd because color had come into fashion photography in a big way by the 1970s. “When he started in the ’40s, black and white was the mark of serious photography,” says Squiers. “It also reproduced the best. I think he saw in black and white.”

As with many artists, Avedon’s vision narrowed as he aged — his late work is almost invariably corrosive and forbidding, as if he was doing penance for the vitality and beauty of the work of his youth — but this exhibit captures him at his best, when he was young, boundlessly energetic and Paris was his stage.

‘Avedon Fashion 1944-2000’

At the Norton Museum of Art through May 9.

Information: (561) 832-5196 or norton.org