Richard Avedon’s Performance gathers portraits of more than 200 figures whose work—and often whose public identity—was formed before an audience. Drawn from the performing arts and broader cultural life of the second half of the twentieth century, its subjects include actors, comedians, singers, musicians, dancers and artists in other media. Hepburn, Chaplin, Monroe, Garland, Brando and Sinatra appear among a much wider company.
The title supplies the book’s central proposition. Avedon understood performance not simply as a professional activity, but as a way people present themselves to one another, intentionally or otherwise. Seen in that light, the portrait sitting becomes another kind of stage: a controlled encounter in which public persona, physical bearing and moments of inwardness may coexist. Rather than offering a conventional history of theatre, film, music or dance, the book considers twentieth-century performance through faces and bodies shaped by the demands of being seen.
The photographs are accompanied by John Lahr’s assessment of Avedon’s work and by personal recollections from Mike Nichols, André Gregory, Mitsuko Uchida and Twyla Tharp. Their accounts of collaborating with the photographer add perspectives from directing, acting, music and dance, placing the images within working relationships rather than treating their subjects only as celebrated names. This combination gives the volume the character of both a photographic survey and a record of exchange between artists.
Published by Harry N. Abrams in 2008, the hardcover runs to 304 pages. Its significance for a serious photobook collection rests on the breadth and clarity of its premise: a sustained consideration of how Avedon photographed people accustomed to constructing meaning in public. The range of sitters, together with the voices of collaborators who experienced his method directly, makes Performance a substantial point of reference for studying portraiture, celebrity and the unstable boundary between presented self and private presence.
