Richard Avedon portrays his father in the disease.
“Richard Avedon spent a considerable fraction of his career helping cement the idea of youth as the stand-in for beauty. {…}
There are very few instances where Avedon was truly able to break out of the prison he found himself in. One of those was provided when Avedon decided to photograph his father Jacob Israel Avedon. Over the course of the last years of his father’s life, the photographer took his portrait. The most arresting of them is from May 15, 1971. All of these portraits are quintessential Avedon - a white or close-to-white background, the framing etc. But while Avedon was a masterful manipulator of his subjects, his ability to do so seems to have slipped here. Or maybe he allowed himself to approach his aging father less as a subject to be molded according to his photographic whims and more like a son who happens to know how to use a camera masterfully. {…}
Whatever the photographer’s relationship to his father might have been, he was confronting not only an old man, he was confronting part of himself. As futile as this might be, we photograph so we can hold on to something, and I cannot imagine someone like Richard Avedon not being very aware of that. So to photograph a moment like the one in that second May 15, 1971 image is nothing but astounding. It is one thing to take a photo of a complete stranger near the end of her or his life. But to take such a photo of one’s own father, a photograph of a moment that for the most part stresses “Remember you are mortal” - that cannot have been done lightly.
Here then is a photograph where any agenda Avedon might have had falls away, where the photographer captured the essence of life, the fact that it fades away a little bit every moment - using the only medium that can do this by arresting the flow of time, photography.”
Read the full article of Joerg Colberg here.
If youre lucky enough to be different never change | via Tumblr on We Heart It - http://weheartit.com/entry/65291227/via/Locaporbieberr
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