Richard Avedon 1923-2004

Born into a Russian-Jewish family in New York, American photographer Richard Avedon transformed portrait photography into a fine art. Avedon worked as a fashion photographer for Harper's Bazaar, Look, and Vogue, but his real passion was portraiture. Celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn (his muse), and the Beatles sought him out for their most public images. Later, Avedon moved away from celebrity portraits to photograph carnival workers and working-class Americans. In 1992, he became the first staff photographer at The New Yorker and, in 1994, the Whitney Museum created a retrospective of his half-century of work, "Richard Avedon: Evidence."