On Richard Avedon’s In The American West

1. The Angle

I’m attracted to hidden lives. Those people who’ve had experiences such that they understand, often on a level beyond language, that status and wealth confer nothing additional upon a person’s character. As impressive as managing a hedge fund or an investment banking portfolio can be, I'm somehow more impressed by someone who knows how to break a chicken’s neck and cook it for dinner (I can't do any of these...). This is not a judgment on people, because I have friends I adore– deeply– in all class groups; no, this is rather a critique of thought. The gospel of materialism simply doesn't quench me, because I need more than surfaces.
Have you noticed how the social messaging of our century wants us to value appearances as if they were the real thing? To equate exposure with success; to equate success with getting ahead, winning awards, dollars, prizes, memberships to the elite. Things you can point to which say, I'm special. Better than others. They want us to think this is the goal, because when we do we buy more stuff.

But what about that which is not quantifiable? In my first book I write of M–, the young single mother of three who escaped her abusive family, secretly catching the Amtrak with her kiddos, safe and sound as the train began moving finally, on their way back to her humble origins in small-town Ohio. I found her quiet, steadfast courageousness heroic, all the moreso because it was uncelebrated. Her face will adorn no billboards, I wrote, but I hope her children grow up to recognize her as the hero she is, loving, sacrificing, living.

In 1874 Thomas Hardy wrote that “It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.” In our contemporary discourse this observation is unsurprising, though it's easy to forget how long today's central topics have been under discussion. Regardless, doesn't Hardy's line also ring true when applied to achievement? Isn't it also difficult for us to define our notions of value in a language chiefly designed to praise quantifiable success? Why do we have to clarify what we mean by success, or power, when discussing someone like M–? Why do these words default to their most superficial definitions? I want a vocabulary that recognizes the beauty and worth of so many of my dearest friends, my passengers, and countless others I'll never meet: those unknown lives so rich with incident and feeling, people who show up for their loved ones, who have modest dreams, who see through the mirage of status and understand that an easier life, or a flashier life, is not always a better one.

2. The Work
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As you read this, and moreso if you've read my books, you won't be surprised to learn that my favorite photographic series has always been Richard Avedon's In the American West. That work, along with Sally Mann’s depictions of rural life and landscape, stand tall for me. Both are triumphs of style in the service of mood, substance, reflection. And both, critically, are celebrations of the hidden lives I mention above. 

In the American West is a collection of 123 large-format film portraits of a demythologised modern West: coal miners, drifters, waitresses, carnies, housewives, oil field workers, snake skinners, hay haulers, Hutterites, prisoners, sheep hands, grain threshers, pawnbrokers. Beginning in 1979 he spent five years with photographer Laura Wilson and a few other assistants in countless middles of nowhere, meeting strangers, finding faces, building relationships in the forgotten corners of our country's vast interior.

Why did Richard Avedon, then the most famous photographer in the world, a rock star who defined the look of Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, who photographed Monroe and Bardot and Hepburn and numerous presidents, make such an unprecedented late-career pivot? After a lifetime of elevating models and celebrities, why did he now turn in the opposite direction?

The project began as a joke between a Fort Worth museum director and his curator, primarily because the idea of the world's premier fashion photographer shooting ranch hands and factory workers was both absurd and impossible to imagine. However, curator knew Avedon, and the concept made its way to him. To everyone's surprise, he was interested. The Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth agreed to meet Avedon's request of a fully funded project lasting five years, with no creative oversight, the option to abandon the project if no solution was found, and a final delivery of 100 prints to be exhibited at the museum. 

He would go on to photograph 17,000 images of 752 people in 17 states. It's worth clarifying that each of those images was not 35mm, not 70mm, not even 120 or 4x5, but a full 8-inch by 10-inch negative, loaded into the camera one sheet at a time, with a resolution capacity which, if you haven't seen in person, you simply don't have the capacity to imagine, because there is no other device in existence, invented before or since, which can generate such a detailed image. You could make a print from it the size of a skyscraper and it would still look crisp.
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It's also worth noting that the 8x10 view camera, as Avedon used it, involves a certain amount of ceremony, and I think this impacted the final portraits. There's a psychological difference between somebody with a tiny point-and-shoot and a camera that needs three people working it, a shooter, loader, and focuser, plus another keeping track of all the negative plates and other ephemera lying around. That and the large white sheet Avedon always placed behind the subject, usually over a building facade, anywhere with neutral outdoor light. He wanted no shadows, nothing to tell the viewer where to look.

Portrait photography would already have been uncommon in these times and places, decades before we all began taking selfies, but what Avedon was doing would've been especially so: he was returning the medium from reflex, which is what photo had lately become, to its original state: that of ritual. The act of creating these portraits was an undertaking, a production, and I have to assume this affected the subjects, gave it a heft and gravitas. They found themselves taking it seriously, collaborating in something that felt unique and special. Also, the camera’s plane of focus was so narrow that the subject’s eyes might be clear but not their nose or ears. They had to remain absolutely still once focus had been set. Candid shots these are not. Additionally, there was another reason for making sure the subjects didn't move: Avedon never looked through the camera after framing and focusing. He stood to one side, letting the subject develop their own private rapport with the lens, knowing there was no one staring through it at them.

Each subject was someone found in the course of Avedon and company’s travels, who agreed to be photographed. The person is shown separate from any background, under neutral daylight, on a massive, grain-free negative sheet that either is orthochromatic or appears so. The title is always the subject’s name, occupation, and date/location. The white background had hitherto only been used with models and movie stars; even today the effect remains striking. You stand in front of them and then the game begins, the game we play with all public photos because photography, with the exception of private photography, is the medium which has no meaning: we instead seek to ascribe meaning to the images. The longer we regard a photograph, the more meanings we come up with. In playing this game we learn about ourselves.

We have to remember that this vision of the West was completely new– one without landscapes, without cowboys, bereft of romance and nature. Shockingly for the time, there were no vistas in this depiction; Avedon wanted to record not the landscape, but the impact of the landscape on the body. The portraits are often unflattering. Freckles and burns and lines and evidence of toil, unseen labour and strife. He wanted to celebrate the uncelebrated. This was arguably the first large-scale reveal that the people of the American West no longer had mythic qualities; it was now a land of the poor, about to be crushed under the greed of Reagan’s deregulated capitalism and later, the corporatization of the West and the beginning of rural drug culture. The West, always a mythic construction, had now become a simulacrum of its former self. 

But this was no journalism project. Avedon didn't pretend to objectivity. “A portrait photographer depends upon another person to complete his picture,” he writes in the dense but brief essay which accompanies the images. “The subject imagined, which in a sense is me, must be discovered by someone else willing to take part in a fiction he cannot possibly know about. My concerns are not his. We have separate ambitions for the image. His need to plead his case probably goes as deep as my need to plead mine, but the control is with me. A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion. There is no such thing as inaccuracy in photographs. All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.”

3. The Search

When did Avedon's stark figure-on-white pieces first enter my life? I no longer remember. It feels truer to say they were always there, lurking, waiting for the right time. I know I'd found them by my twenties, perhaps in college, visual ephemera from 2005, the last time they were shown to the public. Avedon kept a tight leash on the pictures; during his lifetime they were never for sale, and the 17,000 images that weren't used were all destroyed at his direction. He further specified that after his death no prints from the 123 surviving negatives ever be made again, partly because Avedon's exacting printing process could never be duplicated by someone besides him... but mostly because he didn't want the worlds of fashion, high culture and Hollywood exploiting these people or their images. He had become close to these folks, and would maintain friendships with many of them for decades after the project, driving for days to the forgotten towns where they still lived. “I wish I’d never stopped photographing the people we met,” he told Laura Wilson in 2003. “I wish I could have stayed with the project my whole life.”

It's ironic that the climactic achievement of the definitive fashion photographer of the 20th century would be these portraits– dynamic and maximalist as per Avedon’s usual, but resolutely unglamorous. When the images were finally completed in 1985 no museum in New York would agree to exhibit them. The idea of poor people adorning their walls was apparently unthinkable. The Amon Carter premiered the images at their own museum in Fort Worth (this was always the contractual expectation), and the resulting furor involved every imaginable response. The images were offensive; exploitative; uncaring; dismissive; brilliant; empowering; confusing; breathtaking. In the annals of photo history we now understand them as seminal, unsurpassed in their technical exactitude, a milestone in the depiction of ordinary people, the culminating– if unexpected– masterwork of Avedon's long and storied career. I think they're the most significant American photographic work made in the postwar period.

The images are nevertheless very hard to find. Any photographer knows that a reproduction of a print from an 8x10 negative cannot seriously be called a likeness; the drop in resolution and tonal range is akin to a Xerox photocopy of the Mona Lisa, or a VHS recording of a TV broadcast of a Christopher Nolan IMAX feature, although this comparison itself falls flat since an 8x10 negative has over 16 times the resolution of the largest IMAX film. Basically, you really want to see the real thing.

But the full set of 123 has only been exhibited once; 78 of the images were shown again in 2005. Each massive final print was the result of at least 50 drafts, with dozens of dodges and burns per picture, in total using over 60,000 square feet of silver-coated paper and a million gallons of water. They were so hard to create that only three sets of prints were ever made: those belonging to the Amon Carter; another that's archived behind closed doors at the University of Arizona; and a set gifted by Avedon to the original printer, Ruedi Hofman, which the Avedon Foundation refuses to recognize because they’re unsigned. If you missed the 1985 and 2005 shows, like I did, you're out of luck.

The next best thing is the book. All museum exhibitions have an accompanying monograph, and both editions of In The American West, printed the years of the above shows, went out of print instantly. The 1985 first edition in particular continues to fetch high prices online, and every used or rare book bookstore I’ve walked into in the last twenty years has the same answer when I ask, “Do you have Richard Avedon’s In the American West?” They always say no instantly, with confidence, because they know exactly what I’m talking about. This is a title people search for, and it’s not one they give away. I’ve looked in bookstores in LA, New York, Seattle; I’ve gone to the rare book room at Powell’s; I’ve combed through countless photography sections, looking halfheartedly under A for Avedon, a thing you do out of habit, knowing the outcome but trying it anyway. 

Only now do I realize my bus stories are after something quite similar to what Avedon was doing with these pictures. I too am channeling into art my experiences with dismissed and ignored peoples, in order to explore themes of my own choosing. Avedon famously said, “Sometimes I think all my pictures are just pictures of me. My concern is . . . the human predicament; only what I consider the human predicament may simply be my own.” I too am taken by the mysteries and hardship of existence, and compelled to make art from my time with the uncelebrated lives I encounter. I was searching for In the American West before I even had a blog, let alone begun my books.

In 2025 I was in a used bookstore in Lambertville, New Jersey, population 4,139. It was my second time passing through there. The owner, incredibly, remembered my face from my only previous visit, while also noting that my companion hadn’t been in the store before. This was true. We found ourselves in the photography section. Last time I had been surprised to notice a copy of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, the Walker Evans/James Agee collaboration about impoverished Dust Bowl farmers. This time we were excited to discover a boxed first edition of August Sander’s People of the 20th Century, Volumes I-VII. Delightful, but not necessary to purchase. Then my eye wandered to the left. By this point I no longer consciously searched for In the American West. I had lost all expectation. I just looked at the tall, thin book in my periphery because it had an unusual brown cloth binding on its spine.

I remember my brain stumbling on the size of the moment. Could it be? Right here? My companion and I couldn’t believe it. Lambertville. The store had not one but three copies of In the American West, including one that was signed! They had Avedon’s The Sixties. They had Winogrand’s Women are Beautiful for $700. You just never know. We found it. Or so it felt; I think it found us. Because naturally in the course of poring over the book’s reproductions, we couldn’t resist looking up the exhibition history. Would we ever get to see these in person? Sure, they’d only been shown twice in the last four decades, but you find yourself checking anyway, the way you check all the bookstores…

Imagine our surprise. The images were on display right now, 40 of them, for the 40-year anniversary, in Fort Worth, at the original museum and the only place the public has seen the series, on display for… another three weeks.

​Of course we dropped everything and went. We had to. This is what I save money for. This is my rainy day. I mention above the uniqueness and dense clarity of an 8x10 negative, how you really have to see the prints in person. We walked into the room and stood there, inches away from them, no glass between us and the print surface, incredibly, nothing separating us from these faces but time. The first image we came to is also the one on the book cover:

​“Sandra Bennett, twelve year old, Rocky Ford, Colorado, 8/23/80.” ​

In life it is over six feet tall. You find yourself stunned, by the impossible clarity of every strand of hair. Nothing can prepare you for this level of crisp detail. And the punchy blacks, darker than anything mere ink can achieve. You remember that ink on wood pulp cannot touch the vertiginous richness of silver halide crystals burned by light. The gradations of deep grey, almost black but not quite, revealing secrets you never saw in the book. The faces coming alive because they’re bigger than you now, almost able to speak, about to blink, faces you have to look up at. In person there can be no argument: these portraits are clearly and unambiguously reverential. Avedon’s deep respect for each of them fairly oozes from the frames. 

Who are the pictures for? And why did Avedon choose to do this project, with its focus so unlike his previous subjects? I think the images are their own answer. Abrams is reissuing the book version of the series later this year, and they will once again be available at long last, the images able to speak for themselves if only in book form, calling to those who thirst for immediate, unvarnished life, hidden life, who have that great allergy to the limelight I describe above, who have definitions of success our language struggles to capture. 
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The first people Avedon ever showed prints of this project to were a group of coal miners he'd individually photographed in Reliance, Wyoming, population 714. Avedon found that of all the groups he shot, coal miners were generally the most sensitive, perhaps because of their proximity to sudden death. They worked in absurd and miserable conditions and looked out for each other’s lives daily. Laura Wilson writes that they were taken aback when they first saw the prints, tacked up on a building facade as a morning surprise when the workers showed up. They slowed down and took their time, regarding the images with silence and the occasional murmur, considering themselves as seen by another.

I look upon their portraits and wonder what they saw. I hope the thought crossed their mind: My life has value. It is filled to bursting with detail, and emotion, and significance, for no other reason than that I am human.

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​UPDATE: We caution against buying the Abrams reissue, which has a substandard printing process to the previous editions, resulting in reduced tonal range and, for me, a noticeably less emotionally involved experience. Much more in a follow-up post here.

First image: "Debbie McClendon, carney, Thermopolis, Wyoming, 7/29/81."
​Second image: "Roberto Lopez, oil field worker, Lyons, Texas, 9/28/80."

Please note that the images above are not art. They are reproductions of reproductions of reproductions, intended only to give a vague idea. Get the book if you can; or see the prints yourself at the Carter, through August 10th. A note on the Paris show, which is on through October 12: those are just 16" x 20" proof prints, although proofs of all 123 images are on display. But they are not the full-size prints viewable at the Carter Museum, which are either 56" or 76" tall per image. For once you want to be going to Texas, not Paris...

Sources:
Avedon, R. (1985). In the American West. Harry N Abrams Incorporated. 
Wilson, L. (2003). Avedon at work: In the American West. Harry Ransom Humanities Research.