Netflix documentary "Avedon" reviewed; critic says film skips photographer's darker life

10h

Summary

Ron Howard's Netflix documentary "Avedon" covers Richard Avedon's sixty-year career, from 1944 until his death in 2004.
The film traces Avedon from Merchant Marine I.D. photos to Paris fashion shoots and portraits of napalm victims, mental-institution residents, and celebrities.
The review finds the film skims Avedon's darker personal life, including his bisexuality, unhappy marriages, and difficult temperament.
The reviewer argues that what united Avedon's subjects was that, once photographed, they became "Avedons"—stars, whether or not they were celebrities already.

A critic reviewing the film calls Avedon one of the greatest portraitists of the twentieth century and finds him "honest and, perhaps, a little slippery" in a 1970s archival clip.
The critic argues that being photographed by "the John Singer Sargent of his time" must have felt like wish-fulfillment to many of Avedon's subjects.
In the documentary, the model Beverly Johnson calls Avedon, diplomatically, "high-strung," and the film shows him snapping at a visitor on set.
The art director Greg Wakabayashi says in the film that Avedon, despite "making a lot of money shooting beautiful, elegant models," "could not stay away from the events of the time."
Hilton Als notes in the film that the Avedons were "real people—his family—living in a fiction," a tension Avedon lived with as an artist.

“Avedon” Shows the Scars, Just Not the Photographer’s Ownnewyorker.com· 10h
Naomi Fry reviews Ron Howard's Netflix documentary "Avedon," covering Richard Avedon's sixty-year career from Merchant Marine I.D. photos to Paris fashion shoots and portraits of napalm victims, mental-institution residents, and celebrities. She finds the film skims his darker personal life—his bisexuality, unhappy marriages, difficult temperament—while arguing his subjects' true common thread was becoming "Avedons."