Richard Avedon: Portraits of Power

Richard Avedon photographed the faces of politics throughout his career and this book brings together his political portraits for the first time. Juxtaposing images of elite government, media, and labor officials with photographs of countercultural activists, writers and artists, and ordinary citizens caught up in national debates, it explores a five-decade taxonomy of politics and power by one of America’s best-known artists.

The book features Avedon’s extended projects on the civil rights debate in the early 1960s (published in 1964 in Nothing Personal); the American anti-war movement and the war in Vietnam from 1969-1971; portraits of the American power elite in 1976 for his groundbreaking Rolling Stone portfolio The Family; “Exiles: The Kennedy Court at the End of the American Century,” a retrospective homage to the Camelot generation, published in The New Yorker in 1993; and his final photo-essay, “Democracy,” surveying the American state of mind during the politically-fractious time prior to the country’s 2004 presidential election (published posthumously in The New Yorker in 2004).