The Jeu de Paume exhibition

FRANCE, Paris : American Richard Avedon, one of the greatest fashion photographer in the world, is the star of the first big retrospective since his death in 2004, organized by the Jeu de Paume in Paris.

SYNTHE
- Juan Camelo, speaker at the Jeu de Paume




DOPESHEET
The Jeu de Paume is currently exhibiting its first retrospective of Richard Avedon who died in 2004. There you can discover his fashion and portrait photography as well as his reports which document the previously unreleased series of photographs called "In the American West" exhibited only in Paris.
The photographic journey or Richard Avedon is long and complex and both celebrated and unsung. He worked for almost 60 years for many magazines such as Harper's Bazaar, Vogue, The Rolling stone, The New Yorker, etc. He breathed new life into fashion photography, for which he succeeded to impose a new esthetic of movement, and to use natural light whilst all the other photographers were in blacked-out studios. He photographed celebrities and unknowns, capturing a look, a gesture, a personal moment. Further on in his career he did photographs for reports on social causes and big events (civil rights activists, the Vietnam war, etc.) all the while still taking photographs of faces, natural and un-posed.

INTERVIEW with Juan Camelo, speaker at the Jeu de Paume :




"The exhibition is about expressing a very long, very complex career, the complexity of which can't be comprehended by looking at just one of his photographs. Actually there are three main components in the works of Richard Avedon: Fashion photography, portraiture and photography for reports. At the end of the exhibition you really see Avedon's maturity. I would say that it is a long career which started when Avedon was 50 and he really started to fuse the genres of portraiture and reporting in his series of photographs which are a mixture of identity portraits and reports.
There is an important photo in this series which is the one of the man with the bees which was a dream of Avedon's, he dreamed of photographing that image so he put a small ad in an apiculture magazine and this man came forward, someone who worked with bees. But it wasn't about the bees, it was really a mise-en-scene with a fashion side to it but also a surrealist side. They covered the man's torso with royal jelly and put on him something like two or three hundred bees which weren't his own, so there was a certain mobility which wasn't really discernable in the photograph but this man was really risking his skin.
Finally, there is really fantastic centre to Avedon's work and it is he himself that talks in the best manner about his work, even the pieces that are somewhere between two poles, going in-between the fantastical, his personal and subjective projections to a more real side of reports and commentaries, documentaries and social characters. It is all a paradox of his work."




Richard Avedon -- Photographs from 1946 to 2004
Until September 28th 2008
Jeu de Paume, Place de la Concorde, Paris 8e

Music - artist: micky green ; album: white t-shirt ; song: begin to fade ; ref: polydor

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[jmmgarza]

I am currently searching for a video for my documentary photography class. I would of liked to use yours. There is one glaring problem. You should not have placed the music/singer in the background. Can you produce another report without music. The music takes away from what could of been an excellent report. Best of luck.