Appearance and its deceptions

Richard Avedon photographed celebrities. And he photographed nonentities.

What makes him one of the greatest portraitists of the 20th century is that, when he is at his very best, you can't tell which is which.

Forget the old idea that portraiture is about revealing what a sitter has done or some kind of “deeper self''.

Avedon goes even deeper than that, down to the banal personhood that we all share.

He reveals his sitters as being simply there and real. He gives them a compelling authenticity, even if he never claims to reveal the “authentic'' them.

Of course, Avedon needs all the tricks in his toolkit to simulate such unadulterated, unplanned states of being.

Richard Avedon: Portraits of Power at the Corcoran Gallery of Art lets us watch the photographer achieve his no-frills portrait style.

The show's 231 portraits stretch from 1950 — when Avedon was 27 and just launching his career as the world's greatest fashion photographer — to shots done not long before his death in September 2004, when the 81-year-old celebrity was felled by a stroke in the middle of a New Yorker assignment.

The show is not as tight as it could be. Power is interpreted so widely it covers playwright Clifford Odets (the 1950 image) and an average couple from a gun show in Nevada (one of Avedon's last shots).

A better title might have been “Portraits of People'', if that weren't redundant.

The Avedons at the Corcoran give us the real Henry Kissinger. The authentic Andrew Young. The unadorned Ronald Reagan. The actual Duke and Duchess of Windsor.

But also the authentic Abraham Rosenthal, Pete Rozelle and Evelyn Lincoln.

Who? Precisely. The crucial thing about Avedon's approach is he is an equal-opportunity authenticator.

Here you are, in the presence of someone who is supposed to be the greatest recorder of America's great and mighty and you can't tell the players without a scorecard.

Look at Avedon's group portrait of the Chicago Seven, famous opponents of the Vietnam War, presented larger than life on one wall of the Corcoran.

(The huge, unframed photos are the exact prints that were on the wall at Avedon's landmark Marlborough Gallery show in New York in 1975.)

Then turn your back on them to look at a companion image of the 11 men in the Mission Council, who led that war.

You are struck not by the fundamental differences of the two groups but by their underlying sameness. In Avedon's portraits, it is not what or who his sitters are that matters. It is that they are.

Back in 1975, when Avedon was asked if he planned to photograph politicians.

He said no: “There has to be a connection between me and the people I photographed. ... I have to get the sense that we're all in the same boat.''

What he came to realise is that every single one of us is in that boat and that his photographs could convey that fact. How did he do it? Some of Avedon's “tricks'' are right there on the surface.

The neutral lighting and white backgrounds are his most obvious, much discussed devices: They put his portraits in the company of impartial scientific illustrations, of catalogue photographs, of ID shots — which is where Avedon got his start in photography, taking pictures for identity cards in the merchant marine.

Plain white backgrounds deny fanciness or trickery.
The preservation of his negatives' black borders (known in the trade as “rebates'') is a similar device.

Those borders, which became the crucial Avedon trademark, flag the fact that he is using the kind of huge, unwieldy sheet-film camera favoured by the most technical of photographers.

It is as though he doesn't want to risk missing a single pore in any sitter's self. There's no interacting with such a behemoth camera; you are just a thing that is set before its eye to be recorded.

Avedon's black borders also signal that we are seeing every bit of subject that his camera did, without a drop of editing from the photographer.

Avedon's borders assert the edge-to-edge authenticity of a photograph — of his whole photographic technique. And that is supposed to rub off on his sitters.

Then there is where those black edges fall. In many of Avedon's portraits, they slice right through a figure or a body part.

In The Family — Avedon's photo essay on the United States “Bicentennial elite'' comprising 69 images that filled 48 pages of the October 21, 1976, issue of Rolling Stone — many of the mighty have their hands, the most expressive of body parts, cropped off at the wrist. That is authenticity for you.
Avedon's best portraits present him as a machine for seeing. “I just popped in and did it and left,'' is how Donald Rumsfeld remembers his session for the Family series and that squares with other people's memories.

Those are some of the markers of the “truth'' that are right there for the looking in each Avedon portrait. But there are others that operate less openly.

You may not grasp it consciously, for example, but your eye knows that many of these portraits were taken from closer in than usual.

Look hard at Avedon's 2004 portrait of a yet-to-be-famous Illinois state senator, Barack Obama, and you realise that his nose is rather larger than his ears.

That gap in scale is something we only see when we're up close to someone. Without resorting to forced, rhetorical signs of intimacy — a deliberate smile, a welcoming gesture — Avedon can make a remote politician into someone you can get close to.

Or look at how Avedon can make Buckminster Fuller, with an ego's worth of plans for reshaping the Earth, look like the old man next door you want to buttonhole — that you have — buttonholed, since you are so close you see the tops of his shoes and the underside of his chin at the same time.

That means that you're not only close, you're also looking at him from nearer to his navel than his head, another device Avedon uses to stress his portraits' neutral, scientific gaze.

They forgo the eye-to-eye encounter that can make a sitter seem unique and engaging — and too special to be just another one of us.