“His photo saw through me”. “It felt like I had left my body, that I had died, and my spirit was looking at the photograph”.
Billy Mudd is a Texas trucker and one of the protagonists of “In the American West”, Richard Avedon’s masterpiece and one of the most important photographic books ever produced (as well as one of the most controversial and contested).
As is well known, Avedon was commissioned by the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, to create a series of portraits of people in the American West. After five years of work, the “In the American West” exhibition opened at the museum in 1985, and became a polemic classic overnight. Twenty years later -and a year after Avedon’s death-, the Amon Carter showed again 78 of the 124 impossibly powerful images, and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram sought out to find, interview and photograph some of the unforgettable subjects.
Celebrated by many and despised by more than a few, “In the American West” is certainly not a spontaneous collection of portraits- Avedon gave a fixed meaning of the West, one that probably coincides with what the so-called collective imagination (specially East Coasters and Europeans) thinks about the epic West. Yet despite a mediated look, faithful or not, Avedon cannot be accused of dishonesty. His photos were carefully staged and worked- but the subjects are real, the eyes and souls strongly, painfully human. There is truth in their pain, in the sadness and restlessness we feel coming from those existentialist portraits, regardless of their arranged drama.
Pages and pages have been written, and more will keep coming, on Avedon’s supposed pitilessness and cruelty towards the individuals he immortalized. Personally, I see this mercilessness not as coming from the photographer’s eye but being simply the nature of the subject. If Avedon’s method enrages his many critics, it might be for his uncanny ability to portrait the unknown and invisible. We see the body and face of the subject, but also his or her soul, thoughts, inner lives.
Avedon had that magic to go beyond the skin and unveil the spiritual.
Besides, where Kissinger famously begged “Be kind to me” before being shot by Richard Avedon, the unknown Westerners seem to have no fear in having their bodies traversed and their souls exposed, unbeknownst of Avedon’s reputation.
Much of all this can be seen and felt in the impressive Star-Telegram’s interactive feature, “Avedon’s Lone Stars – Then and Now”.
In briefly peeking at the current and past lives of ten of the eighteen Texans gathered by Avedon, we see letters, signed books and photos, invitations, follow-ups, words of warmth and friendship… Certainly not what we would expect of a supposedly manipulative and ruthless photographer that traveled throughout the American West to laugh at and caricaturize the honest folks of the desert and show it to the cultured people of New York.
In each and every interview included, we hear proud people talking with affection about the man who desperately wanted to take their picture. It is truly a mind-opening, vital contribution to a better and more complete understanding of “In the American West”. Here you’ll hear and read the protagonists reflecting on their own super-famous portraits, and what they think is not what many angered critics (mainly from the West) thought twenty years ago and continuously afterwards. Where they saw a hard-to-find-in-the-West freak, a non-representative type fastidiously picked by Avedon to stand out as the image of the desert land, the protagonist sees it his way:
“This picture really reminds me of the toughness of the job… I also see in the photo someone struggling to make it to the next paycheck by holding down a job that he is not really satisfied with. That oil-field job was hard and nasty work”
(James Law, Oil Worker at the time of the shoot)
Law felt not only what Avedon tried to communicate, but also compelled to finish his college degree after seeing himself and the others at the Amon Carter in 1985.
This extraordinary reaction comes from someone whose contact with Richard Avedon lasted no more than 30 minutes. Those who kept in touch with him (or rather, he with them) have even friendlier words and remembrances, calling the artist “Richard” and cherishing the moment they got immortalized as one of the most important in their lives, while ardently identifying themselves with their Avedon images.
This should, then, and contrarily to what has been widely written, assert that -whatever the many views and conceptions of the West- Avedon was respectful and caring to a great degree in treating his subjects, at least those captured “In the American West”.
Billy Mudd’s words with which I have started this reflection are probably the most touching of all, and surely the most vivid description of Richard Avedon’s artistry coming from a non-art person. But there’s plenty to be moved to tears by among the recollections of these humble, working-class Texans with thick accents and big hearts whose lives where forever changed by a classy, unpretentious Manhattanite sent to the American West.
