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.

And let us not forget Donatella Versace’s role in much of the extraordinary image-making that has fixed Versace in our collective imaginations. Donatella helped originate the concept of the brand ambassador, becoming a face and reference for the extraordinary Versace universe. I think the high point in the creative partnership between Donatella and Avedon, who photographed her many times, were those iconic shots for the fragrance Blonde, taken in 1995, which communicate not only the strength of the brand, but also its volcanic presence.

Vreeland (who did not fail to remind Donatella of the importance of sharing the same initials, D.V.) comes to mind: “As models became celebrities, in the 1960s celebrities also became models. It was my idea to use Barbra Streisand as a model. Her success was immediate. I sent her to Paris with Dick Avedon to model the various fashion collections. We immortalized her in profile with that Nefertiti nose of hers....”

In Vogue’s October 1966 issue appears “The Great Fur Caravan”: Veruschka photographed by Avedon in fur in northern Japan, among the snows and “hellish” landscapes (the sulfur springs of Hokkaido). It was a fashion adventure styled by Polly Mellen. As she recounts of Avedon, “Our work together was always, first and foremost, a sharing of thoughts and reflections. The 1966 shoot in Japan, my first major one for Vogue, was an incredible privilege: We had the opportunity to create what really felt strong and relevant at the time.” And then there was their famous image of a nude Nastassja Kinski in 1981" “I had asked her what she liked, and she said, ‘Snakes.’ So with Dick we imagined this encounter, and when the python, resting on her body, kissed her ear, lo and behold, that became the image. And we were all in a trance about the extraordinary magic of that moment. Because we started from an idea, but then what happened was always something more. I want to add that we were not afraid to dare, so that we could offer the reader something special. With Dick I was able to experience the importance of daring, and of believing in what you are doing. The importance of being in the moment.”

Not all of the imagery in “Richard Avedon: Relationships” that was commissioned by Vreeland for Vogue relates to clothes: Fashion, in recognizing the spirit of its time and visualizing it, props up those it deems to be its interpreters. Andy Warhol is pictured after his attempted murder by Valerie Solanas—with the scars starring in the image—and there’s a sequence with members of the Factory. Are these not fashion images, or images that inspired fashion? Are they not on designers’ mood boards? Over the years, Avedon constructed a visual narrative that expresses what for photographer Richard Martin was the relationship between art and fashion: two disciplines that share operating mechanisms precisely because they interpret the common horizon of contemporary visual culture. Avedon’s gaze generated an extraordinary narrative capable of explicating how fashion can deal directly and uninhibitedly with contemporaneity.

 “Richard Avedon: Relationships” is on from September 22 through January 29, 2023.