An American fashion and portrait photographer. He worked for Harper’s Bazaar, Vogue, and Elle, specializing in capturing movement in still images of fashion, theater, and dance. An obituary published in The New York Times stated that “his fashion and portrait photographs helped define America’s image of style, beauty and culture for the last half-century.”

Richard Avedon (1923–2004) was born and lived in New York City. He became interested in photography at an early age, joining the Young Men’s Hebrew Association (YMHA) camera club at twelve. He attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx and co-edited the school’s literary magazine, The Magpie, with James Baldwin. In 1941, he was named New York City’s high school poet laureate.

During the Second World War, Avedon entered military service in 1942 as a Photographer's Mate Second Class in the United States Merchant Marine. As he recalled, his work involved taking identification photographs: before realizing he wanted to become a photographer, he had already photographed what felt like a hundred thousand faces.

After two years of service, he left the merchant marine to become a professional photographer. He initially created fashion images and studied under art director Alexey Brodovitch at the Design Laboratory of the New School for Social Research.

At 22, Avedon began working as a freelance photographer, primarily for Harper’s Bazaar. Initially, he refused to use the magazine’s studio, instead photographing models and fashion on the streets, in nightclubs, at circuses, on beaches, and in other unusual locations. He brought boundless resourcefulness and creativity to these shoots, which became hallmarks of his art. Under Brodovitch’s guidance, he soon became Harper’s Bazaar’s chief photographer.

From the beginning of his career, Avedon produced formal portraits and published them in magazines such as Theatre Arts, Life, Look, and Harper’s Bazaar. He was fascinated by photography’s ability to reveal a person’s character and evoke the life of the subject. He regarded posture, attitude, hairstyle, clothing, and accessories as vital, revealing elements of an image. Confident in the two-dimensional nature of photography, he followed its rules to serve his own style and narrative purposes. As he wryly put it, “My photographs don’t go below the surface. I have great faith in surfaces. A good one is full of clues.”

After serving as guest editor of the April 1965 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, Avedon faced fierce criticism for working with models of color and subsequently left the magazine. He joined Vogue, where he worked for more than two decades. In 1992, Avedon became The New Yorker’s first staff photographer, and his portraits helped redefine the magazine’s aesthetic. During this period, nearly all his fashion photography appeared in the French magazine Égoïste.

Throughout his career, Avedon ran a successful commercial studio and was widely regarded as having erased the boundary between “art” and “commercial” photography. His brand-defining work and long-standing collaborations with Calvin Klein, Revlon, Versace, and dozens of other companies produced some of the most famous advertising campaigns in American history. These campaigns gave Avedon the freedom to undertake major projects exploring his cultural, political, and personal passions. He is known for his extensive portrayals of the American civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, as well as a celebrated series of photographs of his father, Jacob Israel Avedon. In 1976, for Rolling Stone magazine, he produced The Family, a group portrait of America’s power elite during the bicentennial election. From 1979 to 1985, he undertook an extensive commission from the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, culminating in the exhibition and book In the American West.

Avedon’s first museum retrospective was held at the Smithsonian Institution in 1962. Many major museum exhibitions followed, including shows at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1978 and 2002), the Minneapolis Institute of Art (1970), the Amon Carter Museum of American Art (1978, 2002, and 1985), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (1994). His first photography book, Observations, was published in 1959 with an essay by Truman Capote. He continued publishing collections of his work throughout his life, including Nothing Personal (1964, with an essay by James Baldwin), Portraits 1947–1977 (1978, with an essay by Harold Rosenberg), An Autobiography (1993), Evidence 1944–1994 (1994, with essays by Jane Livingston and Adam Gopnik), and The Sixties (1999, with interviews by Doon Arbus).

Richard Avedon suffered a cerebral hemorrhage while on assignment for The New Yorker and died on October 1, 2004, in San Antonio, Texas. He established the Richard Avedon Foundation during his lifetime.