The genius of Richard Avedon
From our UK edition
‘I have seldom had such a delicious hour,’ Isaiah Berlin wrote to me in January 1993. ‘I realise that Avedon and I are now friends for life, even if I never see him again.’ Berlin wasn’t alone in being bewitched. A few months earlier, Tina Brown had taken over as editor of the New Yorker and hired Avedon as staff photographer to open up its pages of solid, sacrosanct text. It was a blasphemous but brilliant move. With him came an incredible archive of images: Picasso, Stravinsky, Beckett, Hitchcock, Bogard, Garland, Auden, Chaplin, Streisand, Bacon, Capote, the Beatles… I could go on. As the TNY’s photographer – its only photographer – Avedon was under commission to produce new work, and as London editor, my role was to suggest new subjects to interest him.
