A Major New Richard Avedon Exhibition is Coming to Milan—With a Little Help From Versace

In my visual memory, Richard Avedon—the photographer whose work, spanning some 60 years, brought us face-to-face with actors, dancers, civil rights activists, heads of state, inventors, musicians, artists, and writers—is first and foremost the author of a series of legendary fashion photographs. Those images have helped define the role of the photographer in the creation of fashion fantasies, and clarified how crucial the relationship between photographer, fashion editor, and art director is on a shoot. (For his part, Avedon got his start at Harper’s Bazaar with Diana Vreeland as fashion editor and Alexey Brodovitch as art director.) His fashion images are a paradigm of the modern, condensing the obsessions, desires, and dreams of a very large audience. In his mother’s tailor shop in Reggio Calabria, where publications such as Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue would arrive, Gianni Versace discovered Avedon as a child through the spectacular photo of Dovima with elephants published in 1955. At that moment, Gianni decided that one day they would work together.

The exhibition “Richard Avedon: Relationships” at the Royal Palace of Milan, produced and organized with Skira Editore (and with Versace and Vogue Italia as partners), presents the opportunity, through a collection of photographs from the Richard Avedon Foundation and the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson selected by curator Rebecca A. Senf, to review Avedon’s work in a kind of continuous, abstract temporality. “I always prefer to work in the studio,” he once wrote. “It isolates people from their environment. They become in a sense…symbolic of themselves. I often feel that people come to me to be photographed as they would go to the doctor or a fortune-teller—to find out how they are. So they’re dependent on me. I have to engage them. Otherwise there’s nothing to photograph.”

The silence that Avedon created around people, cropping their contours to the point of giving them a three-dimensionality, becomes, in his work for fashion, the means of enhancing those clothes that are an imprint of the bodies that inhabit them. For it is the bodies, the skin, the attitude that become the center of the image. In many of the photographs from Avedon’s 20-year collaboration with Versace, the naked bodies are complementary to the dressed ones. (Indeed, The Naked and the Dressed is the title of the 1998 book celebrating that partnership, published the year after Gianni’s death.) The protagonists in the images are models like Kate Moss, Claudia Schiffer, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, and artists like Elton John, Sylvester Stallone, and Prince. It’s a “fearless” series—borrowing an adjective used by Ingrid Sischy to define Versace’s clothes—where models are celebrities and celebrities become models.